Monetary valuation of the Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs): does it contribute to determine a sustainable management of those resources?

This paper reports on the attempts of a project in progress to realise a monetary valuation of all nutritious Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP) extracted by a rural village population in the East Cameroon.The village of Gouté, where the survey is being achieved, is surrounded by a tropical moist forest. A logging company is established in the area too and can, at any time, exploit this ecosystem. The Cost-Benefit Analysis is the usual means of resolving conflicts between opposite users. The purpose of this work is to give an economic value to the NTFP used by the Gouté inhabitants and to show that non-marketed natural resources could be integrated into the economic decision making process about tropical forest. So far, more than 130 NTFP have been listed.Three economic valuation techniques have been used for these forest products:local market pricesmarket price of the nutritious substitute of the non-marketed NTFPtime spent in forest for its collect by the gathererThis article is in two parts. First, the article examines whether products gathered by the population of a Cameroonian forest village (Gouté) make up a minor resource quantitatively. For this, it confronts the field experience with existing literature on the subject and presents the methods of economic valuation used to calculate the total value of NTFPs extracted in Gouté in 1995-1996. Second, the article examines how monetary valuation of these forest resources contributes to determine a sustainable mode for exploiting these resources. It shows the limits of the three valuation methods used, and questions the potential link between economic value of a natural asset and sustainability. Specifically, the project examines how "monetarisation" of free or common natural resources can change traditional use