Issues and concerns

Agriculture and livestock productions are the sectors directly responsible for deforestation and forest degradation. The direct contribution of industrial logging is, in fact, limited. But the development of infrastructure such as logging roads does have the indirect effect of making forests accessible to local people. There is not much hard numerical data on the state of plant cover in Cameroon, and what data we do have are fragmentary and uncoordinated. A great deal remains to be done, despite the considerable body of on-the-ground inventory work accomplished during the 1980s. The area of forest covered by inventories is not complete, and most inventories are old and obsolete. Plantation management follow-up is likewise mostly uncharted territory, which means there is also not much data available on reforestation.

There are five main stumbling-blocks to the implementation of forest management in Cameroon. These are: institutional weakness of the forest service, weak national forest enterprises, insufficient staff for management design and implementation, and a certain indifference to sustainable forest management on the part of the private logging companies. All this makes implementation of the battery of existing instruments for forest management something of a problem. Technical staff are too few and lack the necessary training. Management supervision by the authorities in charge is comparatively poor. The application of forest laws and regulations is hampered by substantial and ongoing irregularities. Weak logistics and human limitations are a constraint to field supervision of forest harvesting activities.

The legislation and regulations on the books are abundant and varied, which can be disconcerting for someone reading these texts. Forest management does not suffer from a lack of legislation or technical standards, the problem is rather that what is on the books has not been translated into action by users either unfamiliar with or unaware of the existence of these texts. There are certain inconsistencies as well. The most important thing now would be to ensure that the legislation and technical standards already in force are actually translated into action on the ground. The main remaining gaps concern poor on-the-ground implementation of sustainable forest management. The standards, techniques and approaches which have been developed, are neither sufficiently appropriate nor effectively implemented.

The boundaries of protected areas are ethereal as well, with local people crossing into or even actually settling within them at will. Conflict between the public services and the local rural population over land and resource appropriation remains a problem. Generally speaking, the protected areas are very poorly-staffed, with trained staff, funding and material resources in particularly short supply.

last updated: Friday, May 13, 2005