The interview lasted more than an hour, but one question burns in me still. This is the transcript of it:

Q: “At the beginning of the training, you told the participants that there is 380,000,000 kinas (US$ 120million) that could be made from the forest in the next 25 years. Don’t you think that by saying this you might raise the expectations of the participants?”

A: “I’m not here to raise their expectations. What I’m trying to do is to teach them how to value their forests. Because, if the community allows industrial logging, that would be how much they will be robbed of by the logging industry... leaving them with 3 kinas per cubic meter of timber and no forest left.

But if they learn how much the value of their forest is, they can do the work themselves in a sustainable manner, have more money for their community and at the end of it still have their forest with them... once again, I’m teaching them to take timber out of their forests, while keeping their forests in their forests.”