Asante Akim South Assembly to set-up task force to check chainsaw operations

The Asante Akim South District Assembly would soon set-up a taskforce to help check activities of illegal chainsaw operators, the District Chief Executive(DCE), Mr Boakye-Yiadom has announced.

The taskforce, which would include representatives from the Police, district assembly, Forest Services Division (FSD) of the Forestry Commission, and communities, would be tasked to protect force reserves form the nefarious activities of chainsaw operators.

Mr Boakye-Yiadom said this when he addressed a district level stakeholders meeting on development alternatives for chainsaw lumbering project in Ghana.

The five-year project, which is being implemented by Tropenbos International- Ghana in collaboration with the Forestry Commission (FC) and the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG), seeks to use multi- stakeholder dialogue to discuss chainsaw lumbering issues at different levels, using staff of the FC.

The meeting was attended by representatives from the assembly, FSD, chainsaw operators and dealers, small scale wood millers, farmers and chiefs.

The DCE said in as much as chainsaw lumbering created employment, it also involved risks and lost of revenue to the state, and called for a sustainable policy that would benefit both the operators and the state.

He noted that since the ban placed on chainsaw lumbering by government in 1998 had failed to halt the trend, there was the need to review the ban to find a lasting solution to the depletion of the nation’s forest.

He suggested the allocation of concessions to small scale wood millers, saying such a move would discourage illegal chainsaw lumbering, and the state would benefit from such activities.

The DCE advocated the alternative use of wood such as bamboo to reduce the reliance on the forest for the manufacturing of wood products.

Mr Bright Manso-Howard, the District Forestry Manager, said the persistence of the chainsaw menace, a decade after it was banned, requires concrete measures to save the nation’s forest.

He said the alarming rate at which the nation’s forest reserves had depleted, has left it with just a little over one million hectares of forest, out of the eight million hectares bequeathed by the colonial government.

He pointed out that if stringent measures were not put in place to check the situation, Ghana would be compelled to import timber in the next five years, adding that government loses over 50 million dollars through illegal chainsaw lumbering.