TOTAL REVENUE COLLECTION AND DISTRIBUTION

Information about the area clearfelled and forest revenue collected over the period 1975 to 1987 is given in Table 1. This table also includes information about revenue collected from sources other than wood. At 31^st March 1987, the total amount of money in the Forest Fund stood at M 214,688.30, with an additional M 36,719.66 in the Woodlot Community Account.

Twenty percent of the revenue collected is returned to communities for them to use for approved community development schemes. A procedure for the disbursement of this revenue has been finalised and communities have been advised twice of the revenue standing to their credit. The remaining 80 of revenue collected goes into the Forestry Fund, to be used for afforestation.

Table 1 clearly indicates how much money has been collected each year from different forest products. An attempt was made to get some more up-to-date figures on charge collection but it was not possible to get information at this level of detail, because revenue reports are no longer sent to the Forestry Division’s headquarters.

The total amount of forest revenue collected to date by centralised and decentralised levels of Government from the main charges identified above is M 985,655.13. An estimate of the revenue collected in the current financial year (based on the figure up to 14^th December 2000) is approximately M 90,000.

Details of the revenue collected and put into the Forestry Fund in the 1999 – 2000 financial year are shown in Table 2, along with the expenditure from the fund in this year. This information is kept at the National Treasury within the Ministry of Finance in their main financial database (called GOLFIS) where all the details of the Forestry Fund are kept. As the table shows, there was a significant flow of money into the fund in this year and very little expenditure on afforestation.