We've Been Thrown Out Of Business - Timber Contractors

Friday March 05, 2010
By Lawrence Markwei

Local timber contractors say they have been thrown out of business since prime lands at forest reserves have been allocated to expatriate loggers.

Speaking to the Times in Accra yesterday Mr Boateng Poku chairman of Ghana Timber Association said local timber contractors are given concessions in open forests which do not have enough timber species.

The Forest Reserves are virgin forests with prime timber species as against the open forests whose trees, owned by families and stools have been depleted through farming activities.

Mr Poku said in the past, expatriates were not allowed into logging but were made to take up the secondary and tertiary level of production in the timber industry.

“Thus most of them were into saw-milling and furniture production which add value to the timber for export”, he said.

Mr Poku called for a law to save the local industry “as many of our members are now jobless and cannot make ends meet with their financial obligations.”

However, an official of Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Joseph Osiakwa said with the country’s timber becoming a scarce resource the government has resorted to granting of concessions through bidding.

He said the expatriates seem to have taken over the business because they have the money “and government also needs the money to develop the sector.”

He said Ghana’s remaining forest estate is under increasing pressure, particularly from agriculture and logging, and this calls for prudence in the allocation of timber resources.

Mr Osiakwan said out of the 8.2 million hectares of forest cover at the start of the 20th century, only about 1.4 hectares remained by 2,000.

The present predicament of local timber contractors, he said, emerged when the government banned the export of logs in raw form in most of the were enraged.

Mr Osiakwan said when the law was passed for value to be added to the logs before exports, most of the local contractors could not meet the huge capital outlay needed and therefore had to fold up, giving the expatriates the opportunity to import machines for sawmilling,

According to him even with the current development the volume of logging falls for below the capacities of the sawmills. While the annual allowable cut stands at 2 million cubic metres, the sawmills need about 5 million cubic metres to meet their capacity.

He said this has given birth to illegal logging to feed the sawmills since many need the logs to stay in business and government has responded by embarking on an afforestation project to restore the degraded forest cover.

Posted under

Comments