On November 2, 1999, the department of forests ( dof ) and the Community Forestry Development Programme ( cfdp ), both under the ministry of forests and soil conservation, issued a circular to forest officials across the country to ask fug s to immediately stop commercialisation of timber. "However, all the district forest officers made changes in the content of the circular. Instead, they issued a notice asking fug s to stop all their forest-related activities,' says Apsara Chapagain, a steering committee member of fecofun . "Now the forest rangers even prohibit the users' groups from entering their own forests. This is the time for trimming the twigs but we haven't been allowed to do anything like that inside the community-protected forest,' she adds.

The decision, as K B Shrestha of cfdp , says, "was aimed at the terai region where the fug s are felling young sal trees for commercial purposes'. It is not applicable to the hills , he adds. But district forest officials have included the hills too.

The terai has remained a troubled frontier. As the cfm programme enters the seventh year, the success in the hills is overshadowed by the failure in the terai . In fact, the World Bank, which assessed cfm in the terai , described it as a