Forest products’ statistics play a crucial role in policy formulation and planning for sustainable management of the forest resource both at national and sub-national level. Nevertheless, it has been realised that in many countries, the capabilities related to the collection and analysis of forestry information and statistics is either very weak or is given less attention. According to FAO, this has led to the undermining of the adoption of sustainable forest management practices in such countries.
Thus, EC-FAO, initiated a collaborative program, GCP/INT/679/EC, 1998-2000) on ‘Data collection, and analysis for sustainable Forest Management in ACP-Countries-linking National and International Efforts’. The aim of the program is to strengthen national capabilities related to forestry information and statistics in some selected countries, of which Uganda is lucky to be one. This paper is the output of the work of a national expert who has been hired to review and validate the existing data, including proposals of how to improve the statistical situation in the forest sector in Uganda (see terms of reference attached for details).
The paper is structured as follows: In Section 1, an overview about the situation of wood products in Uganda is given, which is followed an assessment of the current status of national forestry statistics related to wood products in section 3. Thereafter, an evaluation of the data collected and the methodology is presented in section 4. This is then followed by proposals for improvements of the national statistical process in section 5. In section 6, the sources of data both published and unpublished are given and finally section 7 reviews the FAO’s yearbook of forest products with updates of the data for Uganda.
