Review

Non-timber forest products receive, to quote the first words of the introduction (Chapter 1) of this book, “wide attention throughout the tropics.” It has repeatedly been said that they could play an important economical and social role in regional development, and it has been implied or stated that developing countries would do wise in furthering such a role and to recognize the sustainable exploitation of non-timber forest products as a preferable alternative for the non-sustainable timber exploitation as practised now in most tropical countries. This is the second publication in the Tropenbos Series on nontimber forest products. It focuses on a part of Borneo and explores the potential value of these products for the area studied. The vegetation of the area is described in Chapter 2 where also each species found is awarded an ‘importance value index’. This is the sum of relative density, relative dominance and relative frequency, and is a measure of the (numeric) importance of the species in the vegetation. Its use in the context of non-timber forest products is not so obvious.