F. Forest fires
17. Recurrent prolonged droughts continue to cause serious forest fires in several countries. Partly due to poorly developed danger rating and suppression capacities, wild fires have destroyed or degraded large forests in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia in the past five years. Fire damage is further aggravated by the rapidly decline standards of forest management or lack of it.
G. Efforts to control desertification
18. The Sudano-Sahelian belt of the sub-region, in particular, is plagued by periodic severe droughts. The drought experienced in this belt between 1968 and 1973 was so devastating as to attract central attention at the United Nations Conference on Desertification in Nairobi in 1978. This also led to the establishment of the United Nations Sudano-Sahelian Office (UNSO). UNSO is a special fund within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) system, which assists the countries of the belt to protect their land resources and to improve the standard of living of their populations through desertification measures. Since 1985, UNSO has continued to provide support to countries of the sub-region in desertification control efforts. UNSO has funded small to medium-sized projects aimed at combating desertification in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya. Such projects are funded to the level of US $ 200 - 300,000 for over a period of 1 to 3 years each.
H. Forestry institutional issues
19. During the past five years, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have made significant progress in forest sector reform process. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have recently adopted new forest policies. Ethiopia has just implemented institutional reforms, which better integrates forestry, agriculture and environmental management. Eritrea has recently elaborated forest policy within its overall National Environment Action Plan (NEAP). Djibouti has still to develop a revised forest policy while Somalia currently lacks a central forum for the development of national forest policy.
20. In general, the countries still rely on centralised forest administration with little provisions for private sector and involvement of local communities. Thus, Forest Departments still play dominant roles in forest management, regulation and ownership. However, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya have started implementing forest sector re-structuring featuring devolution of management and ownership roles and which embrace privatisation and partnership with local communities.
21. Overall, forestry institutions remain relatively weak and inadequate for present and future sustainable forest management challenges. Kenya has a relatively strong forestry research institution. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania each have University departments/faculties of forestry which are training foresters both for the domestic and sub-regional deployment Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia are particularly weak in forestry institutions and deserve priority in capacity building efforts.
I. Forest management issues
22. In general, there are notable failures with centrally co-ordinated forest management planning and implementation in most of the countries. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda and Tanzania have recently started on decentralised forest management strategy. These moves are, however, not yet sufficiently rationalised in the context of the overall national development strategies.
23. The national forest services are faced with sharply declining government fund allocations and external funding against increasing forest management and protection costs. Forest revenue, once remitted to government treasury, is often not fully re-allocated for forest management and protection. Recently, some countries like Tanzania have formalised forest revenue retention schemes to ensure that forest revenue are directly used for forest management. It needs emphasis that, with proper valuation and efficient collection of revenue from forest goods and services, sustainable forest management can be economically feasible. However, even with revenue retention schemes the due revenue will not be realized due to (a) corrupt practices (lack of code of ethics), (b) inefficiency in revenue collection, (c) under valuation of the various goods and services.
24. Some countries like Tanzania are moving towards Joint Forest Management Agreements with local communities. However, there remain many policy and legislation issues to be resolved.
25. There are cases of political interference in the orderly formulation and implementation of forest management plans. Such interferences could be top-down as may be the case in Kenya, or bottom-up as may be the case in Uganda.
J. Production and trade in forest products
26. Kenya has plywood, pulp and paper industrial production for both domestic and sub-regional market. Tanzania has pulp and paper industrial production for domestic market. Currently, some of the countries like Kenya have restricted exploitation and trade in some commercially valuable indigenous tree species.
27. There is great potential expanded industrial plantation development in Kenya and Tanzania. This is particularly so for the coastal zones where there exists large tracts of land which are marginal for intensive agricultural production but which could be suitable for plantations of fast growing species like Tectona grandis, Gmelina arborea, Pinus caribeae, etc. With conducive environment for investment, suitable incentives and long-term land lease arrangements could realize some five-fold increase in plantation production by the year 2020.
28. Non-wood forest products are also important in household and national economies. For example, it is estimated that the vast Miombo woodlands have a potential production some 150,000 tonnes of honey and 10,000 tonnes of beeswax annually.
K. Some cross-cutting issues
29. Deforestation remains the most serious threat to sustainable agricultural and forestry production in the region. It has a complex web of underlying factors, which do not lend themselves to easy solutions in isolation. It has become generally accepted that effective mitigation of deforestation rests with improving technologies for food production in ways, which also assure sustained services and products of trees and forests.
30. The main causes of deforestation and land/forest degradation are human-induced and include forest/tree clearing for agricultural expansion, fuel wood and charcoal collection, and logging operations. Other causes include mining, resettlements, wild fires, over-grazing, and recurrent droughts.
31. Modern agroforestry practices show great promise as solution to the combination of declining land productivity, fodder and fuelwood scarcity. Tree products can substitute for other more expensive products such as dairy meal and nitrogen fertilizer. This can amount to substantial cash savings for households thereby enabling them to make other investments they previously could not afford. For example, it has been estimated, from recent agroforestry research trials, that a dairy farmer can obtain the same milk yields by substituting Calliandra fodder for dairy meal, thus generating a cash saving of approximately US $ 130 -150 per cow per year. Recommended nitrogen fertilizers for western Kenya cost approximately US $ 75/hectare/year if applied only once. Improved fallow can provide the same level of nitrogen with no cash outlays.
32. One of the main constraints to sustainable forest management in some of the countries is the traditional land and tree tenure, which work against tree growing and protection of trees and forests by communities and individual farmers.
33. The rampant internal and cross boundary conflicts have direct, and often overriding, consequences on conservation and management of forest resources. Many forests of these countries remain unsafe to manage or simply out of bound. The growing number of people displaced by the conflicts ravage forest resources even beyond their national boundaries.
