A Global Review of Non-timber Forest Products for Sustainable Livelihoods: Challenges, Opportunities, and Strategic Interventions

International audience Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) — the fruits, nuts, fibres, medicinal plants, resins, honey, mushrooms, bushmeat and other biological materials drawn from forests without felling trees for timber — sustain the food security, income and cultural identity of hundreds of millions of forest-dependent people across the tropics and subtropics. Despite decades of scholarly and policy attention, the sector remains fragmented in its evidence base, uneven in its regional coverage, and persistently undervalued in national accounting systems. This review synthesises the global literature on NTFPs published largely between 2010 and early 2026, drawing on peer-reviewed studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America to examine the economic, ecological, gendered and institutional dimensions of NTFP-based livelihoods. It traces the contribution of NTFPs to household income and food security, the structural weaknesses of commercialisation and value chains, the gendered distribution of labour and benefit within NTFP economies, the ecological consequences of harvesting at population and ecosystem scales, and the governance and tenure arrangements that determine who may collect, process and sell these resources. It further considers the disruptive effects of climate variability and the COVID-19 pandemic on NTFP-dependent livelihoods, and the growing role of certification, bioeconomy strategies and domestication programmes in reconciling commercial expansion with resource sustainability. The review closes with an assessment of future research priorities, practical conclusions for policy and practice, and the methodological limitations inherent in a narrative synthesis of this kind. The overall picture is one of considerable but conditional promise: NTFPs can meaningfully reduce poverty and strengthen resilience, but only where secure tenure, equitable value chains, sound ecological monitoring and gender-responsive institutions are simultaneously in place.