The views of local and governmental forest stakeholders on agriculture and livestock in the Almaneh forests in Sarv Abad city

Forest conversion to agriculture, Forest Understory cultivation and grazing in the forest are considered as the most important factors in the destruction of Zagros forests and in this regard, local and governmental stakeholders have different and contradictory views together. The purpose of this study was to gain a perspective of stakeholders regarding agricultural and livestock activities in Almaneh allotment forests in Sarvabad city. In the Almaneh`s forest village, agricultural activities whether farming or horticultural are carried out either inside the forest (in the form of understory farming, or deforestation and conversion to agriculture and orchard) or at the edge of the forest which in any case affects the forest. In this village livestock also has a direct impact on the forest and it can always be described as an integral part of the forest.

The statistical society of this study includes the people of Almaneh village and some experts of the Natural Resources and Agricultural offices of Kurdistan province. The main instrument of the study is a questionnaire and In total, 115 local and state stakeholders views using a Likert scale on Forest conversion to agriculture, Forest Understory cultivation and grazing in the forest were investigated. Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests were used for data analysis using SPSS software.

According to the results, local stakeholders are not aware of their activities in deforestation and agricultural experts agree with them. But natural resources experts have opposite view. In other words, local and state practitioners have a different perspective on many aspects of the activity and the conflict between local practitioners and government experts, especially natural resource experts, is clearly visible.

So, from a stakeholders perspective, a common item is selected as the selected stakeholders item in all three activities, which shows that these activities are due to economic problems and the lack of local people's income.