What exactly are non-timber forest products?
Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) can be defined a multitude of ways, but in my website I will be speaking of NTFPs which are products like chicle, honey, fruits, nuts, wild game, biochemically active plants, and others (including ecotourism and fresh air and water, but excluding fuelwood) which come from a forest. Panayouto and Ashton (1992) state that these NTFPs are sometimes referred to as “petty” or “minor” forest products, yet they can be equal to or greater in value than timber. NTFPs differ from timber in a number of ways. The first way is that there is a greater variety of products and of species. It is impossible to count the number of NTFPs in existence as we do not even know all the different plants that make up many forests. Another way in which NTFPs differ from timber is in the frequency of harvest cycles. In tropical rainforests, second harvests of a given stand should be at lest 20 to 25 years after the first, due to the long growing cycles of commercial tropical hard
