Community-Based Management of Walnut-Fruit Forests and Pastures — Jalal-Abad Region (Kyrgyzstan)

The walnut-fruit forests of Jalal-Abad region in southern Kyrgyzstan, centred on villages like Arslanbob, contain the world's largest area of naturally grown walnut forest. Soviet-era state forest enterprises (leshozes) lease plots to local households, but up to 75% of the surrounding pastures and forests are degraded from overgrazing and unsustainable harvesting. From September 2018 to July 2023, Germany's GIZ ran a EUR 4.9 million programme with Kyrgyz state forest agencies and research partners (World Agroforestry/ICRAF, the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, Rhine-Waal and Eberswalde universities) to strengthen community-based leasehold management in the Bazar-Korgon and Aksy districts.

The programme improved monitoring, trained smallholders in agroforestry, and helped 'wild walnut kernels' gain a dedicated international UNECE product quality standard (DDP-02) to open better export markets.

A peer-reviewed household survey of the neighbouring Toskool-Ata leshoz (71,723 ha, including 2,861 ha of walnut forest) found forest-leaseholding households earned on average just 14,417 KGS (about US$165) per year versus 48,789 KGS (about US$559) for non-forest-user households in the same communities, both well below Kyrgyzstan's roughly US$1,323 per-capita income. Only 61.3% of forest users were satisfied with the lease policy, 71% considered lease fees too expensive, and 62% found the leasing process complicated, though 74.1% said they would plant more trees if given government fencing support. Agroforestry trials found that planting entirely new tree-crop plots barely generates income, whereas thinning older trees for timber before replanting with young walnut and companion crops does.

The programme reflects a genuine effort to formalise and improve community forest governance in an ecologically unique landscape, but the evaluation data show the leasehold model has not yet closed the income gap between forest-dependent and other rural households, and satisfaction with governance remains mixed.