One potential intervention is to relieve the time constraint for women involved in fuel collection, taking into consideration that fuel collection often is carried out jointly with other activities. The potential for time savings for women from the establishment of community plantations is exemplified in an evaluation of the Sida-funded Orissa Social Forestry Program in India. Köhlin (1998)<sup>19</sup> finds for a random sample of villages with and without plantations that the introduction of community plantations reduced the collection time for households who collect by almost 10 hours a week. The main beneficiaries of this change were the women that reduced their collection time by more than 10 hours a week. In the case of Orissa, men participated more than women in collection and participation by men and children increased further with the introduction of easily accessible community plantations, to the benefit of the women. The collection also became more efficient. The marginal product was significantly higher for collection in community plantations than in natural forests both for men and women. And men had a significantly higher marginal product in collection – in the case of collection in natural forests, more than twice that of women. The value of the time saved through the introduction of community plantations differed greatly, from zero to 455 USD per hectare per year<sup>20</sup> , primarily depending on the availability of readily available substitutes (Köhlin and Amacher, 2005). Similarly, Van‘t Veld et al. (2006) found that in villages with JFM projects, women were more likely to collect fuelwood from the village forests, and spend less time collecting essentially the same quantity of fuelwood.

The conclusion is that there are significant potential welfare gains from tree planting and forest management interventions for resource-constrained women. The good news for targeting is that there is self-selection: as long as collection is time-consuming the poorer women with lower opportunity cost of time utilize the resource more. Still, projects could be targeted based on indicators such as time spent collecting, availability of close substitutes, and household capacity to adapt to scarcity.

# **_2.2.2 Implications for agricultural production_**

**Another potential motivation for interventions supporting tree planting and forest management is declining agricultural productivity as inputs are diverted from agriculture to fuels in response to woodfuel scarcity. Limited evidence from Ethiopia indicates that improved stoves are more important than planting of trees in increasing the use of dung as manure instead of as fuel. However, the evidence on this is not gender specific, and does not suggest immediate agricultural impacts.**

A commonly cited concern is that in places where fuelwood is scarce and dung is used as fuel instead of as manure, agricultural production may be negatively affected. Consequently, community plantations as well as private tree planting are expected to increase application of manure as fertilizer. However, Van‘t Veld et al. (2006) find that households avoid using dung as fuel at times of the year when it is useful as fertilizer. Cooke et al. 2008 find that the cross-price evidence between fuelwood and dung, and fuelwood and crop residues is mixed as to whether the fuels are substitutes or complements. Mekonnen and Köhlin (2008) specifically study the use of dung as fuel or manure in a panel of more than 1300 households in the Ethiopian highlands in 2000, 2002 and 2005. They find only weak evidence that more trees increase the probability of applying dung as manure. A much stronger effect comes from the use of improved stoves, which significantly increases the probability that dung is used only as manure. Households with more women, on the other hand, are more likely to use the dung as fuel, rather than as manure. As long as dung use as fuel has strong cultural and taste

> 19 We will use this evaluation of welfare implications of a Social Forestry project to exemplify more general points. Although the implementation of community plantations was not randomized by design, it was evidently not designed to meet the fuelwood needs of the villages since the utilization ranged from zero to meeting 80% of fuel needs.

> 20 13,670 Indian rupees in 1995. Exchange rate at the time was Rs. 30 per USD. The average value of time saved was USD 135 per hectare community plantation. This was estimated using the time savings, a time based consumer surplus measure and one of two estimates of opportunity cost of time.

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