Forestry Commission to seek alternative means of revenue generation

Page 48
08-07-08

THE Forestry Commission (FC) is seeking alternative means of generating revenue to support its work and update forest management plans, the Chief Executive of the Forestry Commission (FC), Prof. Nii Ashie Kotey, has said.
That, he said, would go a long way to ensure sustainable forest management.
Prof. Kotey made this known at the opening of a two-day workshop on Forest Management Planning in Accra yesterday.
The workshop, which is being organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature, seeks to create a platform for stakeholder consultation on meeting requirements for forest certification.
Prof. Kotey said technological changes were a major challenge to the commission’s efforts at achieving sustainable forest management, and that technological changes had placed new demands on the commission.
“This requires investments to respond to changes in technological needs of society, due to a lack of adequate financial resources, inadequate capacity of personnel and logistics. This lack of capacity has affected our ability to bring up-to-date a significant number of management plans,” he said.
This, he added, had impacted on the commission’s capacity to achieve sustainable forest management, “to meet the requirements of certification.”
Prof. Kotey said “despite the effort of the government, that of the civil society in particular, and that of the Global Forest Trade Network in providing support to promote forest certification, Ghana is yet to have certified timber on the world market.”
The workshop, he said, couldn’t have come at a better time than now, considering how current market signals indicated that there would soon be a demand for a certified Ghanaian timber.
“It is, therefore, critical that we keep certification as our ultimate goal,” he said, and stressed the need for increased co-operation between the Forestry Commission, the timber trade associations, private sector, civil society, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as all relevant stakeholders to take full advantage of the initiative and ensure sustainable management of the country’s forest.
The chief executive expressed the hope that by the end of the workshop, effective and practical recommendations would have been made to address the numerous challenges facing the country in planning for a sustainable management of its forests.
Mr Alhassan Attah, the Executive Director in charge of Timber Industry Development Division (TIDD) of the Forestry Commission, stressed the need for co-operation from the various stakeholders in the sector.
Forest management certification was first embraced at a stakeholder’s workshop in June, 1996. But once field-testing began, it became clear that a lack of forest management knowledge was causing practical forest management to fall below the required standards.
It is the goal of the workshop to identify criteria to expand timber utilisation contracts and develop guidelines that will align with the Forest Stewardship Council’s requirements.