Critical Weaknesses Of Deforestation

For the purpose of the research, a base-line survey was conducted on forest sectors’ capacity, a field visit to the study organisations/institutions, questionnaire survey and a key informant interviews were undertaken. These tools were also applied to study the required capacity. The assessment revealed information about the forest conservation sectors and their critical weakness. These critical weaknesses will be discussed in details here.

1. Forest Policy

The capacity of FC in research and policy formulation is limited to the development of rules and regulations for forest issues. The traditional approach to solve deforestation is to promote natural regeneration programmes. The failure of these policies increases the rate of deforestation

But the field research indicated that there is little coordination of planning, implementation and supervisory activities between the organisations/institutions in the forest sector. The districts managers agreed that the DAs have no clear environmental integrated plan that spell out the demarcation of the land for agriculture, mining and reserve. Nonetheless there are always conflicts between the local community members and the forest officials. Although the activities of the organisations have direct impact on the forest resource, there has not been an effective mechanism for coordinating their activities. This is due to lack of willingness and opportunities to meet and discuss about forest issue. The number of effective meeting session has been less so far. The DA considers forest issue as sole responsibility of the FSD and other civil societies. This situation could mean that there is a weak relationship between the forest sectors and the DA. It deprives the FSD NGOs and DA the opportunity to interact and acquire planning, implementation and supervisory skills from each

The type of staff that are lacking in RECA was administrator and programme manager. On the other hand CODESULT also lack also ICT and data administrator. Also NGC has limited number of field staff to go to the community to collect data which makes the work to be difficult. One field officer has to visit many communities within a shortest time and it is affecting their health. At the time of assessment the FSD advertised a vacancy to the public for range supervisors. This clearly supports the fact that the FSD needs extra staff. The FSD also experience limited technical training for effective function. When staff training programm is available, attention is always given to the managerial members of the FSD to the negligence of the forest guards. This makes the forest guards to be more clueless and inexperience in dealing with problems in the forest. Most of the forest guards lack knowledge on emerging issues such as conservation schemes, practices and