It is a little over one year since the United Nations launched the new Expanded Technical Assistance Program whose origins have already been traced in Unasylva. (Issue for Oct.-Dec. 1950).
The missions of technical experts engaged on this program are already in touch with problems which will have to be faced during a long period of sustained activity - problems of techniques, science, administration, social adjustment and finance.
The success of the Program will, in the long view, be judged by the progress made in implementing the recommendations of the experts sent out under the Program. It is important that everything should be done to put these experts in a position to make wise recommendations, based on the best access to existing knowledge. Of equal importance is the creation in countries receiving technical assistance of conditions which will make possible the implementation of the recommendations of the experts. This, too, requires access to knowledge and technical information.
One step in this direction is to make known the kinds of research in forestry and forest products that are being conducted throughout the world. To this end FAO will shortly distribute a document summarizing all the major lines of research in these fields being undertaken by the U.S. Forest Service, and it is hoped that this can be followed by current reporting of research in other countries and regions.
The magnitude of the whole technical assistance effort, both the programs of the United Nations and its specialized agencies and of individual countries, may best be judged by the Director-General's statement in his annual report for the year 1950/51. He believes that the technical assistance movement, which FAO helped to foster, will prove to be the most significant development of our life time.
"I believe," he says, it can effectively counteract the forces that work to undermine freedom and threaten world peace. Those forces operate best in an atmosphere of poverty, frustration and injustice. They do not thrive in an atmosphere of expanding opportunity for common men.
"This is essentially a movement to wipe out mass hunger and lift the burden of hopeless poverty from men's shoulders by applying modern scientific knowledge to the development of the earth's resources. It is a far more fundamental solution of the world's ills than the military and political preoccupations that now absorb so much of the attention of governments.
"If the drive for economic development and expanded opportunity grows as it should, it will make this period in which we live like the great age of exploration, when adventurous men roamed the seas and discovered new worlds, initiating the westward movement that opened up the vast North American continent. Those movements stirred the imagination of men and focussed their energies on great creative achievements. The same thing can happen again, and I believe it is beginning to happen now."
One of the current jobs on the Gold Coast is to prevent wholesale destruction, of forests through fires and shifting cultivation, although, pending the introduction of better methods of farming, the latter must confine outside the reserved forests.
A typical roadside temporary plantation
Cypress plantations in Tanganyika Territory
In Tanganyika Territory, cypress plantations, are formed with the aid of temporary cultivation. Lining out a plantation has just finished in the foreground; a four year old plantation is behind. (Photos by courtesy of the Imperial Forestry Institute, Oxford.)
