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‘Create special fund for afforestation’

Members of the Private Afforestation Developers Organisation (PADO) have suggested to the government to create a special fund to assist them in their efforts to recover the country’s depleted forest cover.

Ghana’s forest cover of eight  million hectares after independence has depleted to its current 1.6 million hectare with about 65,000 hectares being depleted annually.

Illegal logging and bushfires have been identified as the main causes of deforestation and it is projected that the decline will continue if nothing is done to curtail  and restore parts of the country’s depleted forests.

It is as a result of this that Parliament amended the Forestry Plantation Development Fund Act, 2000 in 2002 to enable plantation growers both in the public and the private sectors to participate in forest plantation.

The Act provides for the establishment of a Forest Plantation Development Fund to provide assistance for forest plantation developers.

But at a stakeholders workshop in Accra, attended by some members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Lands and Forestry and members of the PADO, the afforestation developers complained  about the inadequacy of the assistance from the fund, created by the Act.

The workshop was organised for the presentation of a BUSAC funded research report on the Forest Plantation Development Fund.

Membership of PADO are made up of individuals located in the Ashanti, Brong Ahafo and the Volta regions.

During discussions, it came out that some of the forest afforestation developers had refused to access loans offered them from the fund because the amounts approved for them were too small to do any meaningful development on their plantation.

One of the forest developers, Pastor Joseph Baffuor Asare said it would be better for the government to create a special fund to assist them since loans from the fund created by the Act was inadequate.

He explained that afforestation was a high risk business with the trees taking more than 10 years to mature, banks were refusing to offer them loans and it was incumbent on the government to create a special fund if the country really wanted to restore its depleted forest cover.

“The government should come to our aid since what is available from the fund is insufficient. What can an afforestation developer with about 120 or 300 hectares do with a loan of GH¢5,000.00”, he said adding that even GH¢20,000.00 cannot be enough for the clearing and pegging alone”.

The President of PADO, Mr Osei Bonsu, said posterity would not forgive the current generation if efforts were not quickened to plant more trees to recover parts of the country’s depleted forest cover.

The Member of Parliament for Bantama, Mr Kwabena Kokofu who chaired the function suggested that small scale forest developers should be separated from large scale ones to enable the Forest Plantation Development Fund to properly assist them according to their needs.

Story: Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah / Daily Graphic / Ghana

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