GTMO adopts strategies to reverse dwindling fortunes of timber industry
The Ghana Timber Millers Organisation (GTMO) has developed strategies that will reverse the downward trend of the timber industry in the country.
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The strategies, it said, would also propel the growth of the timber industry in Ghana.
This was contained in the ‘Review of Performance of the Timber Industry in Ghana for 2013 and 2014’ made available to the Daily Graphic.
Job losses
The timber industry lost 35,000 jobs following the collapse of 60 companies, reducing revenue from a whopping 184 million euros in 2007 to 120 million euros in 2014.
“Despite the potential for growth, the timber industry in Ghana has experienced a steady decline in performance over the past 20 years. However, the last five years will go down in the history of Ghana as the worst period of timber business and if left unassisted, it will eventually collapse,” the GTMO warned.
Against the current situation where all companies are struggling to survive, it said the coming years looked very scary for the timber industry.
That, it said, meant that any additional increase in the cost of operations would bring the industry crumbling down, adding that “it is the expectation of industry operators that the government would institute interventions that would stem the tide. The areas that the industry is expecting intervention include raw material supply, rationalisation of forest fees, capacity for value addition, operational cost minimisation and funding schemes for forestry sector development”.
Resource expansion
Towards the improvement of the natural forest stoking and expansion of the timber resource base, the GTMO said instead of the current do-nothing approach to natural forest management, the Forestry Commission (FC), through the Forest Services Division (FSD), should apply well-tested and most appropriate natural forest management techniques that would allow for retention of adequate and superior seed trees to ensure more regeneration, adopt liberation thinning and enrichment planting techniques to increase growth of residual trees of high value species.
“On-farm timber production can increase by 10 times if the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources should review the distribution of timber revenue from on-farm trees to ensure that the farmer who nurtured the tree gets adequately remunerated for their toils”.
High forest
“If this can be done across the six million hectares of farmlands in the high forest zone and the woodland savannah, it would constitute a very reliable source of timber. The climate and soils conditions of Ghana can support a forest plantation production of 30-60 million cubic metres a year and round wood value of 21 billion dollars per annum,” it said among other things.