Namibia has clearly made an earnest attempt and developed a national forestry programme in the form of a National Forestry Strategic Plan of 1996. The plan has 4 broad programme areas namely, institutional capacity building, community level management of natural forests, environmental and farm forestry. The philosophies underpinning these programmes have been described and areas in which achievements ought to be made have been identified within the strategy.
Due to the will of the Government of Namibia and donor support, notably Finland, Denmark, Germany and Sweden, the strategy represents one of the few that have been implemented immediately after its development and national adoption.
The forestry programme is still very much in its incipient stages of implementation and insufficient experience has been gathered since programmes have not been running for long into their life spans. It requires another 5 years or thereabouts to be able to assess whether the mid-term objectives of the strategy have been met.
The implementation of the national forestry strategy is still weak in the areas of private sector involvement. This is partly explained by the low yielding status of the natural forests after almost a century of exploitation without due management considerations and also environmental limits to the development of industrial plantations. Income generation and farm forestry to improve farm productivity and maintenance of soil fertility through forestry is also weak and initial attempts are only being made now to address these.
The forest sector is making progress but it has yet to overcome its traditionally underrated image. It has to attempt to overcome this by getting more involved in collaborative programmes such as biodiversity conservation, fire management at the national level, regional land use planning bodies, income generating projects and a greater role in the forestry advisory council provided for in the new forest bill.
Implementation of the national programme is still suffering from insufficient qualified and experienced staff despite the successful training programme, which is already producing results.
A major issue for the sector is the adoption of Criteria and Indicators, which needs to be tested since it could be used by the forest sector to garner more political support for its programmes.
For now it appears that financing of forestry programmes has enjoyed both government and donor support. However, financing is likely to go down, especially from donors since Namibia is considered a middle-income country by African standards despite having one of the most skewed income distributions in Africa since 5% of the population control about 80% of the income. This is likely to be negative to funding for forestry, which traditionally suffers even in countries, which have huge industrial plantations. However the economic contribution of the forest sector, the political support it enjoys suggest, and given the small size of the forest service, the current national forestry programme will be sustained even if scaled down due budgetary constraints.
