6. Conclusions and Recommendations

The state of forest sector statistics in Nigeria is uncoordinated and thus not effective. A general apathy still exists with respect to a conscious and systematic collection of forestry statistics. The need to formalise a statistical unit within the Federal Department of Forestry, that is well funded and staffed with the correctly trained manpower is very essential for a meaningful forest sector data collection programme. At present forest sector statistics especially forest products has a low quantitative sufficiency, poor reliability and thus not timely. The causes have been traced to inadequate resources in personnel and equipment for data collection. Data collection has been ad-hoc and lacked co-ordination and division of labour among institutions that generated and uses the statistics.

The Federal Government must come up with a clear-cut policy on forestry data collection and must determine whose responsibility it is to collect forestry data and how such organisation should be funded. It is believed that the Planning Cell of the Federal Department of Forestry which already exist and have some expertise could be strengthened and empowered to perform this role. The Planning Cell should be provided with adequate tools viz.: vehicles, computers (see Table 8) and the minimal funding to facilitate information gathering and analysis. Other staff categories of the Planning Cell and field offices need to be exposed to training courses, seminar and workshops to enable them to cope properly with the task of data collection and processing.

Table 8: Equipment required by the Planning cell to metamorphose into a Statistical Unit.

The equipment listed above could be provided by International agency, like FAO, through its grant-in-aid programme to improve the capability of the Federal Department of Forestry in data collection and analysis in the pursuit of a sustainable tropical forestry development for Nigeria.