Government is working to retool timber industry – Minister
The government is working closely with key stakeholders to develop strategies to retool the timber industry, particularly in the secondary and tertiary processing of plantation timber products.
Mr Benito Owusu Bio, the Deputy Minister of Lands and Forestry, said the Ministry and the Forestry Commission were working to ensure value addition to the many timber plantations established across the country.
That, he said, would lead to enhanced job creation, improved rural livelihoods, and elevate Ghana as a continental leader in forest-based industries.
Mr Owusu Bio was speaking at the inauguration of a Teak Tissue Culture Laboratory at Amangoase in the Atwima Mponua District of the Ashanti Region.
He said an industrial tour had already been organized to enable some selected wood industry giants to interact with their counterparts in Vietnam and India to facilitate the transformation process.
One of the critical challenges hindering the private sector investment in forest landscape restoration initiatives was the limited access to capital.
That was as a result of the perceived long-term period required to obtain returns on investments in forest plantations, as well as risks associated with such initiatives, Mr Owusu Bio said.
Recognizing the challenge, the Ministry had been able to negotiate a seven-million-dollar credit facility from the World Bank, under the Ghana Forest Investment Programme, for disbursement as concessionary loan to small and medium-scale private commercial forest plantation developers in Ghana.
The loan facility, he said, would be disbursed to qualified private plantation developers through the Agricultural Development Bank, hopefully before the end of the first quarter.
The investment was intended to bring complete transformation to “the business-as-usual scenarios” and provide opportunities for private plantation developers to establish more forest plantations, the Deputy Minister said.
That would make them contribute significantly towards Ghana’s aggressive reforestation and afforestation agenda.
Source: GNA