Commonwealth Forests

bullet1 Chapter 1: The Forest Resource

bullet2 FOREST OWNERSHIP

Ownership of forests in the Commonwealth is predominantly public, with the exception of forests in Caribbean countries.  In Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu most of the forest is owned by customary landowner groups.  The ownership of Other Wooded Land follows a similar pattern. Annex 2.9 shows that the countries with significant proportions of private forest are:

  1. Africa – Uganda (70%), Mauritius (47%) and South Africa (34%);

  2. Caribbean – Barbados (96%), Jamaica (65%), Saint Lucia (53%), Grenada (31%), Trinidad & Tobago (25%) and Bahamas (20%);

  3. South Asia – Pakistan (34%);

  4. South-east Asia and the Pacific – Papua New Guinea (97% “other”), Fiji(93%) New Zealand (37%);

  5. Europe – United Kingdom (64%) and Cyprus (39%).

Many Commonwealth countries have been privatising plantations which were formerly owned by the State.  New Zealand and the UK have been among the first to do this, since the mid-1980s.  New Zealand’s experience has been that internationalization followed privatization – evidently all major plantation areas are owned by non-New Zealand owners. In South Africa, on the other hand, the privatisation programme stalled in the late 1990s following democratisation since it was felt, among other reasons, that it would not contribute to addressing social problems.  In the end, learning from the New Zealand model, some sales of publicly-owned plantations did go ahead, but with provisions for sales of 10% of shares to black groups, 9% to employees, and the land would be leased in the long-term but the state would retain ownership (Bethlehem and Dlomo, 2003).