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The article presents a study that introduces and applies a new approach in evaluating the sustainability of nontimber forest products, such as palms, in the U.S. tropical forests. The new approach combines the two demographic analyses of matrix population models, the prospective and retrospective analyses. The first analysis relates harvest effect on vital rates with their importance for population growth rate, while the second analysis includes a life table response experiment (LTRE) to detect the contributions of vital rate changes to change in population growth rate. The LTRE analysis was then applied to Geonoma deversa, a clustered forest understory palm, which shows that commercial leaf cutting in the palm is potentially sustainable.