Factors that are crucial for improvement of the situation or to avoid undesirable consequences.
To avoid undesirable outcomes the forest sector ought to do the following:
Must seek or develop new technology to add value to its own wood and non-wood resources and pursue their marketing within and outside Namibia’s borders.
Namibia should use its economic advantage to establish value-added forest-based industries from imported high value and utility timber species for local consumption and re-export. Such a policy will enhance technological development and attract much-needed investment.
Namibia should establish plantations and wood lots to supply its farming communities with treated poles for fencing and construction and to produce non-wood products such as fruits and oil producing nuts. The promotion of indigenous fruit and nut trees to develop already known products and to produce novel or lesser-known products is a worthwhile pursuit to squeeze more value out of our forests and trees outside forests.
In order to help the forest sector the Criteria and Indicators Initiative in SFM should first and foremost be regarded as a useful tool for advocacy for the forest sector, not a gimmick for attracting donor funds. It is only when the local public and policy makers get convinced of the importance of the forest sector that we will have a legally recognized forest estate which will yield tangible and intangible benefits that forests are known for.
The forest sector must see to it that strategic forestry planning is adopted through the support by central government, by regional land boards and also recognized at the Central Government by ministries in charge of Lands and Regional and Local Government.
The forest sector should also produce a national paper on critical forest conservation areas and negotiate strategies for their management before they are legally gazetted as conservation areas.
In pursuit of the empowerment of local communities the strategy for community level management must be consolidated during NDP2 so that by 2010, all declared community forest reserves will be under sustainable management, including proper fire management and supported through the liaison between central government and donors.
The utilization of traditionally under-utilized species such as Burkea africana and Acacia to produce new products such as reconstituted wood products, flooring strips and compressed charcoal briquettes is a definite growth area in the face of rapid advances in wood-processing technology.
Strategies such as live fencing, subsidized transportation of fuel wood to areas of deficit will help reduce pressure from heavily used forest resources and enable rehabilitation programmes.
The policy of decentralization ought to be pursued but should be phased in as regional and local governments take charge of their own planning, implementation and monitoring of local development programmes. A good way of phasing this is to encourage regional governments to identify and manage regional forest reserves as provided for in the current forest legislation which is currently in parliament. That way they will begin to gather experience in resource governance since they will also be in charge of lands, agriculture, health and others.
Donors should increasingly act as catalysts for locally meaningful change by investing in developments that have global benefits such as conservation of biological diversity, mitigation of climate change and also in income generating activities since this improves incomes and may have the positive result of making people more amenable to philosophies of conservation, sustainable use. The current attitude of having inordinate amounts of faith in the private sector and market forces is often short sighted. Donors should be partners with local communities as the vanguards of real changes to people’s lives and should not leave communities to the vagaries of profit-driven capitalists to deal with the often-unsuspecting local people.
To increase investments in the forest sector and contribute to the modern economy, the forest administration should pursue its policy to promote the greater participation of the private sector in value-added industries. In this regard, it should jointly promote investment in partnership with the Ministry of Trade and Industry. It will also require that the forest administration work more effectively through other sectors to realize the aspirations of its mandate.
To steer development in the forest sector in a rapidly changing environment and increasing "globalisation", there should a policy review body or forum that would debate current and emerging issues in order to plan for the sector, taking into consideration the likely risks that the sector is likely to face. Periodic strategic planning processes, say, every 10 years could support this sort of forum.
