About 70 percent of Myanmar's total population dwells in rural areas and depends on forest resources, for their subsistence. This puts tremendous pressure on open access resources which constitutes 45 percent of the total land area in the country. To address problems such as deforestation and forest degradation, Myanmar instituted several decentralized forest management schemes. One of the approaches is the community forestry (CF), which was initiated in 1995 through the Community Forestry Instruction (CFI).
