Wild food plants play a very important role in the livelihoods of rural communities as an integral part of the subsistence strategy of people in Nepal. Under community forestry programmes, many local forest user groups (FUGs) in Nepal have drawn up management plans, which ignore edible plants and other non-timber forest products. As a consequence, there is a lack of information about the diversity of species actually used locally. Furthermore the management plans fail to regulate the use of this important resource. Such ignorance results in over-exploitation of commercially demanded species, random harvesting, a lack of equitable sharing of benefits from the use of resources from a community-managed forest, and deprives the poorest groups in the community of the resource.

A study was carried out by Prasanna M. Shrestha and Shivcharn S. Dhillion of Agricultural University of Norway to document wild food species of a locally managed forest in Bonch VDC of Dolakha district, Nepal. Data on the diversity, and traditional knowledge on plant use, propagation and local domestication collected through household and key informant interviews, forest transects inventories and herbaria verifications is presented.

Sixty-two wild food plants belonging to 36 families were recorded; most of them (80%) have multiple uses. Many of the food plants are herbaceous (24 species) and produce fruits for consumption (46%). The study found that most of the food plants are consumed by the local communities as snacks, and are supplementary and nutritionally important especially prior to the harvest of staple foods. Many villagers also possess knowledge on the modes of propagation for the food plants that may be used in the process of domestication. The local communities expressed a strong desire for the establishment of community enterprises based on the wild food resources for long-term income generation sources.

The study recommends development of collective co-operative strategies based on assessments of the biology, size of harvestable population, sustainable harvesting techniques, and marketing value and demand of promising species. It also recommends to encourage domestication potential of wild food species through incentive and policy interventions.

Prasanna M. Shrestha, Shivcharn S. Dhillion, Diversity and Traditional Knowledge Concerning Wild Food Species in a Locally Managed Forest in Nepal, Agroforestry Systems, Volume 66, Issue 1, Jan 2006, Pages 55 - 63