Angola is indeed a potential forest country within the SADC Community and apart from this, has immense natural resources able to contribute to the development of other sectors, e.g. forestry sector. It is recognised that with a good policy and attribution of value to sector and operating accordingly, this would be capable to contribute at least with US$ 150 million per year to the economy of the country, independently to other important functions fulfilled by the sector, but unfortunately almost or completely ignored to the economy country's ranking.
The forestry sector is operating under its full capacity due to a range of problems, being naturally internal and external, affecting all the vital economic sectors of the country. There is a great need to reverse this trend by identifying adequate and sustainable short, medium and long terms solutions enabling the country to create good atmosphere with regard to the future of this very important sector in many aspects considered vital to the development of the sector, specially to with regard policy and socio-economic areas.
The development and operation of the forestry sector is almost left to the government. However, lastly the participation of other sectors is becoming an important fact, despite of limitations in most cases imposed by the government. Therefore, there is a need to open to all partners direct or indirectly involved to the development of the forestry sector, specially the private sector for attracting investments and the community to ensuring the management of the sector. International Community has a crucial role to play to the overall process, therefore the government must be aware of it and place should lelft to this important partner. With this regard, good and realistic policy needs to be established as well as the development and application of incentives for specific groups contributing to the sustainable development of the forest.
The instability is of course the major handicap hindering the development of the country as whole. It is a hardship to visualise the forestry sector toward year 2020 when the move to the development is absolutely linked to peace/war factor. The perspective of sector requires to be seen in two scenarios, i.e. in the peace atmosphere and in the current instability atmosphere. However in the first case, the need of development policy addressing all negative factors should be put in place and for the second scenario, a development of policy maintaining the functioning of the sector taking in account the war factor will be required.
