GACF


During the second World Summit on Sustainable Development (DSSD) celebrated in Johannesburg, South Africa, various peasant organizations met. Among them was the Federation of Community Forestry Users of Nepal (FECOFUN) who engaged in discussions with ACICAFOC to give a follow-up to the World Summit implementation plan. Of these conversations between ACICAFOC and FECOFUN, the necessity was raised to program an encounter between the community experiences of different parts of the world that would have as an objective to discuss and build a
community agenda based on their necessities and realities. For this reason, conversations began with representatives of the Ford Foundation to search funding to make this meeting possible. Fortunately, the Ford Foundation supported this process which initiated then..

In February of 2004 a meeting was carried out in Bangkok, Thailand, where universities, NGO's and some representatives of the community groups participated. In this meeting a document was elaborated which expressed the dissent of the community groups with the presented agendas, since those last ones only visualized the NGO's and investigation center's position. That is why the groups have outlined the necessity to propose their own agenda based on their community experiences.

The International Encounter of Communities on the access, use and management of natural resources, gathered federations of community based organization at the international level, who met in Ixlu, Petén, Guatemala from the 1st to the 6th of November 2004. The encounter meeting built general guidelines for the definition of a global agenda of community forestry that answers the real necessities of the community groups. In addition, the participating community organizations created the Global Alliance of Community Forestry (GACF).