 From remote villages to city timber yards, researchers from the Centre for International Forestry Research, C4, have been crisscrossing the Ecuadorian Amazon trying to unravel the story of the country's complex domestic timber market. The study is part of the pro-formal project, which is comparing these domestic markets across five countries, trying to understand how smallholders and chainsaw millers relate to these markets and their links to the international timber trade. Part of the study used household surveys, which are carried out in 20 communities in two of Ecuador's Amazon provinces to assess the role that timber plays in people's livelihoods. I think Ecuador is important to ratify the importance that timber has in providing income for these smallholders and indigenous communities in the rural areas. Most of them depend on different degrees of income from timber. The surveys revealed that in some communities, timber sales contributed up to 50 percent of family's income, although this varied a lot between the villages. They also found that they use the forest that smallholders use to fulfill their needs. They say, well, I need to give my children education, some health, something like that, and they take and cut a tree. So they use it to generate these basic needs, which are education and health. Ecuador is in the process of regulating its domestic forestry sector and is trying to bring rural producers into the system. Now with the new law, the environment also protects us a lot more. We have to work through programs. If you don't do it with programs, you can't sell either. The C4 study found smallholders actually make bigger profits when they harvest timber with a management plan. And, like Luis, they do the work themselves. But despite this, more than half of those survey said they cut timber informally last year. Over time, there's more understanding about the institutional obstacles and barriers that communities and smallholders face. But still, there is a lack of enough political willingness to make these regulations a bit more flexible, to facilitate the life of smallholders and communities, and to think that forest management probably can be done in more two different ways. And there's not just one model that can be implemented everywhere.