FAO Forestry country profiles - forest management
Issues and concerns
Forestry activities in Angola are in a virtual state of paralysis due to the civil war which has persisted for several decades. The forestry sector has been severely affected, and timber production has dropped off considerably since war broke out in 1975. All forest industries have been destroyed. The war is not the only factor affecting wood production. Even prior to its outbreak there was a notable lack of expertise and considerable wastage due to poor harvesting and processing practices. In the mid-1990s, some forest enterprises tried to continue production activities, but the war made this impossible. The forest sector in Angola has been in a state of virtual neglect throughout the last two or even three decades, due to the war. The upshot of this neglect has been severe forest resource degradation due to overexploitation of the natural growth, and a major crisis in the forest products needed by the population. The fact is that while levels of forest harvesting remained fairly low during the war years, exploitation was and is wholly uncontrolled.
The annual rate of deforestation is estimated at - 0.2 percent for the 1990s, mainly due to removals of wood and non-wood forest products to meet the basic needs of the population, especially for fuelwood, the main source of energy in rural as in urban areas. The forest is the prime source of revenue for many rural families, especially those engaged in charcoal-making. The expansion of slash-and-burn cultivation has also caused widespread devastation of forest cover. In addition, small-scale agriculture, the most common form, suffers from inadequate land classification, forcing rural dwellers onto marginal land to meet their household needs and grow a few cash crops to provide a little monetary income. Even greater degradation is wreaked around the main towns by urban dwellers attempting to meet their fuelwood needs and planting subsistence crops near urban areas. A great many present-day urban dwellers are also displaced persons from rural areas who were pushed out of their homes in the countryside by the war.
What we are now seeing is intensified land use in newly-settled areas of population aggregation. These migrations have also heightened land use conflicts. The problem of desertification, particularly in southern Angola, is a further aggravating factor.
Forest plantations might be able to compensate somewhat for the impact of forest degradation and deforestation, but plantations remain unfortunately undeveloped, and the lack of silvicultural treatments and management plans mean that the plantations are, by and large, degraded as well. Chronic short-staffing in the forest service translates into lack of monitoring on the ground, further accentuating the problem.
Major constraints in the forestry sector include the lack of appropriate forestry legislation for sustainable forest management and forestry sector administration. There are no funds to implement much-needed development programmes, trained staff are lacking at every level, there is no operational forest management plan, inter-institutional cooperation among the agencies responsible for natural resource management and administration is poor. And, of course, the chronic state of political instability has a very negative impact on the development of Angola¿s main economic sectors.
The IDF is representative and does a good job, but is forced to contend with a raft of socioeconomic problems. Administrative and professional staff are far too few in number to perform their planning and management duties as they should, not to mention coping with the day-to-day organizational matters of the forest sector. The sector is extremely short of the equipment and funds needed for programme and project implementation. No forest management plan is operational on the ground, and therefore the present state of conservation of natural and artificial forests remains highly critical. And the highly important participation of private sector partners in forest management is severely hampered by factors such as the unsatisfactory forest policy still in place, especially with respect to land tenure.
National environmental policy and legislation also fall short of the mark. Protected area classifications quite fail to meet international classification standards, and virtually all of Angola¿s parks and reserves are in a state of total neglect. The entire parks system has in fact been placed on the list of war-endangered protected areas since 1988, due to the severe management gap in the wake of civil war, unauthorized incursions of local populations, and the lack of infrastructure. This is aggravated by the paucity of staff, resources and support. It is hard to describe the current state of protected areas with any degree of exactitude. The same must also be said of unprotected forest areas, since there has been no forest inventory or substantial field study to evaluate the current state of forest resources. What data we do have is old, partial and obsolete.
Peace and stability thus continue to the decisive factors upon which the successful development of the forestry sector will hinge, and this is especially true of sustainable forest management.