Workshop on strengthening capabilities of Forest fringe communities held
About 100 participants attended a day’s workshop on strengthening the capabilities of Forest fringe communities in Southern Ghana to halt illegal logging at Akyem Oda.
The workshop, which was organized by Forest Research Institute of Ghana aimed at sensitizing and building the capacities of local communities on forest policy, laws and agreements as well as determined motivational needs for monitoring and reporting on illegal logging.
Dr Dominic Blay, Project leader, said the legal framework for forest reserves in Ghana indicated that most of the reserves were owned by corporate customary stools or clans.
“Customary law provides no restriction on destruction or use of trees and national legislation seeks only to prohibit the destruction or sale of commercial timber trees”.
Dr Blay said an analysis of the procedures related to forest reserves showed that laws governing them had stifled the local land tenure system and given local communities a disincentive to protect reserves.
Dr Blay said those procedures failed to properly take into account the rights of community near the reserves.
He said “With few or no rights nearby farmers and communities have had no incentive to protect, manage, or invest in the resource”.
Dr Blay said many landowners and farmers negotiate secretly with chainsaw operators to have trees on their land illegally harvested than to allow the legitimate concessionaries to harvest the trees and pay token compensation.
He said that situation accounted for the proliferation of many illegal logging activities in many forests.
Mr Wilson Owusu-Asare, the Akyem Oda District Forest Manager, said it is an offence to own or operate a chainsaw without registering it with the District Assembly.
He said it is also an offence to convey or possess timber without a conveyance certificate and to sell or offer for sale lumber cut with a chainsaw.
Source: GNA