The furniture industry is one of the 'big four' Indonesian pillars for export (along with rubber, palm oil, and footwear). The industry relies heavily on timber as its raw material, with an annual requirement of up to 7.5 million cubic metres. Wood species used as raw material for furniture (mainly teak and mahogany) come from natural forest and plantation/community forests. Jepara in Java is particularly known for its crafted wooden furniture, and the industry there involves 15,000 companies, mostly small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

Terminalia catappa (Bislama Name – Natapoa), or tropical almond, has been identified as an excellent agroforestry tree species for Vanuatu and similar areas of the humid tropics and subtropics. Natapoa has been identified by the Vanuatu Department of Forests (DoF) as a priority plantation and reforestation species. Natapoa produces edible nuts, medicines and timber.

Value-added wood processing methods using forest resources have been created through this ACIAR project in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Opportunities for economic growth, employment, and increased value-added processing of harvested logs, will greatly improve national and local markets.  More than 60% of PNG’s total land mass is forested and owned by traditional landowners. Closed forest in PNG covers 29 million ha, of which 10 million ha have been allocated by the PNG Government under timber permits for commercial development. 

This project focused on interaction between people and forests and investigated how forest can sustain livelihoods and improve food security. 80% of Papua New Guineans live in rural areas and they depend heavily on their forests. Forests cover 63% of Papua New Guinea, and 97% of these forests are held in customary land ownership. Communities own most land and forests, so community forestry offers villagers a way of managing or developing these assets.

This project aimed to enhance the capacity of household agroforestry systems and community forests to generate livelihoods and food security in the mid-hills region of Nepal. Nepal is the 17th poorest country in the world; 41% of the population are under-nourished and 30 of its 75 districts are food insecure. 66% of the population live off a combination of agriculture and forest products.

This project aimed to make the value chain of planted wood in the Lao PDR more efficient. This improved both the international competitiveness of Lao wood industries and the livelihoods of farmers and processing workers. Laos has an emerging forest plantation industry. The timber industry has rapidly grown over the past three decades, based on both smallholder and corporate growers. The Lao PDR government envisages a substantial forest plantation estate, with 500,000 hectares of tree plantations by 2020.

The project aimed to make community and smallholder forestry in the Solomon Islands more profitable through wider application of high value agroforestry and improved management of secondary forests. Community and smallholder forestry could make many rural communities in the Solomon Islands economically secure, but 8-10,000 hectares of smallholder plantations need thinning to the final stocking rate to produce high value timber, and infrastructure is often inadequate to get the timber to market.

This project aimed to develop an Extension Management System (EMS) and guidelines for implementing a newly mandated set of comprehensive extension interventions. The agricultural sector of Lao PDR is undergoing rapid change, particularly in relation to increasing private sector investment, and this is placing new demands on agriculture extension. This has led to the creation of a new Department of Agriculture Extension and Cooperatives (DAEC) that will support districts and provinces to provide effective extension services.

This project aimed to promote higher value utilisation of Vietnam's acacia and eucalypt plantations by optimising veneer production from this resource, leading to higher returns to smallholder farmers. The project also examined veneer production from selected species in Australia as a parallel technological improvement and innovation work on wood based composite processes and engineered wood products (EWPs) which can be transferred in Vietnam. 

This project contributed to social and economic benefits in Papua New Guinea (PNG) through new and improved engineered wood product (EWP) technologies. PNG has abundant forest resources. Harvesting from these forests and subsequent processing activities generate significant value to landowners, communities and local economies.

This Small Research Activity (SRA) aimed to develop DNA-based legality verification and chain of custody systems for teak in Laos, Indonesia, Solomon Islands and PNG, where ACIAR has teak projects. In Myanmar and Thailand, it made sure the teak DNA database represents the SE Asian natural forest and plantations from which teak is harvested. This project built on two SRAs (FST/2014/028 and FST/2015/007) that developed DNA markers that could be used with teak timber and that studied the teak chains in Indonesia and Myanmar.

The “Agroforestry for Livelihoods of Smallholder Farmers in Northwest Vietnam” (AFLi) was a five-year project (2011-2016). The project’s aim was to improve the performance of smallholder farming systems in northwest Vietnam through agroforestry. It sought to increase the productivity of associated crop and livestock systems, leading to more diverse and sustainable production systems and better income from tree products.

This project built on a substantial body of work in Vietnam in the breeding of acacia species and hybrids, which enhanced the production of high-value germplasm required to meet the Government of Vietnam's objectives for an expanded plantation estate for sawlog and fibre production. Vietnam now has an acacia plantation estate of over 400,000 ha, including over 150,000 ha of clonal Acacia mangium X A. auriculiformis (A. hybrid), whose large-scale operational use has been pioneered by Vietnamese scientists.

The many benefits of agroforestry have been widely identified, yet the area under agroforestry in Fiji and Vanuatu has in fact declined in recent decades, for example due to a push for growing export products during the colonial era, and the progressive urbanization of the population. While sugarcane growing and coconut production remain highly important land uses and sources of revenue in Fiji and Vanuatu respectively, there is considerable underutilized land in both countries.