Tropical forests offer many more products than the category for which they are best known, viz. wood products. While it is sometimes difficult to quantify the economic values of these diverse goods and services, they are often to be reckoned as equal to, if not higher than, the marketplace values represented by the commercial hardwood timber. Yet when the forests are exploited for their hardwood timber, the process is usually so disruptive to forest ecosystems that the other outputs are severely reduced. By contrast, one may exploit the forests for their other outputs with virtually no disruption to forest ecosystems. The paper describes the main categories of non-wood products available from tropical forests, analyses their relative worth, and offers summarized proposals for an expanded approach to forest development in order to take integrative account of the full range of forest benefits.
