Sokoban artisans seek govt support for plantation project
The Chairman of the Sokoban Wood Village, Mr Charles Kra Boadu, has appealed to the government to support the wood village financially in their efforts to establish a tree plantation project to sustain the environment and their businesses.
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He said financial challenges had halted efforts of the artisans to establish the project although they had acquired huge acres and gone through other processes for the establishment of the project.
Mr Boadu made the appeal in an interview with the Daily Graphic when a group of journalists visited the wood village last Friday.
The visit was part of a tour of some forestry establishments in the Ashanti Region organised by Nature and Development Foundation (NDF), an environmental non-governmental organisation.
Depletion
Mr Boadu said the rate at which the country’s forests were being depleted due to both legal and illegal logging called for attention on the establishment of plantations as a major intervention to protect the environment.
According to him, plantations would also help sustain timber species that were going extinct such as rose wood, mahogany and odum.
He said plantations would ensure the constant supply of legal lumber for the domestic market and help stop illegal logging.
“The forest is almost gone and more than 8,000 people who depend on the forest for their business in this wood village alone are on the verge of becoming jobless so something must be done fast,” he said.
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Forest cover
Forestry experts have warned that Ghana risks losing its total forest cover to illegal logging in 10 years if the current rate of forest depletion is not curtailed.
The country’s forest cover, which stood at 8.6 million hectares by the turn of the 19th century, now stands at 1.8 million hectares.
The Operations Director for the NDF foundation, Mr Glen Asomaning, said the rate of forest cover loss was a threat to sustainable socio-economic development.
He, therefore, called for concerted efforts to arrest the decline.
Mr Asomaning mentioned, for instance, the need for the government to put in place policies that would facilitate the establishment of timber plantations by both public and private sector players in the timber industry.
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