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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 The development of forest management systems
By the end of the 19th century the importance of forests for the sustainable supply of goods
(not only timber, but also firewood) and services, especially watershed protection, had been
recognised. Reservation, which included both physical demarcation of boundaries as well as
the control of logging, had started in India since the First India Forest Act of 1862 and
continued in Burma (now Myanmar) and subsequently in Straits Settlements (now Malaysia).
It was the main forestry activity in colonial Africa and the Caribbean in the 1920s, 1930s and
into the 1950s.
The first management systems for tropical forests were those developed for teak forests in
India and Burma (Myanmar) from the mid-19th century (described in Dawkins and Philip, op.
cit), while plantation techniques were developed for many other countries. But the
development of silvicultural systems for the management of other tropical moist forest types
were not developed until the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Malayan Uniform System, the
Timber Stand Improvement of Uganda (also a uniform system) and the Tropical Shelterwood
System of Ghana. They combined yield control by minimum girth/diameter limits and the
poisoning of “weed” trees to liberate the “desirable” species for which there was a market.
Twenty years later these systems were no longer used for a number of reasons, including high
costs and lack of staff, while a recent study of the effects of harvest regulations in Ghanaian
forests did not find increased regeneration or a balanced size-class distribution arising from
nine decades of their application (Asamaoah Adam et al. 2006).
By the 1980s the sustainable management of tropical moist forest appeared to be almost non-existent
and the permanency of the forest estate, the basis of sustainable management, was
often threatened. The ITTO report No Timber Without Trees (Poore et al. 1989) showed that
a
very small area was even in theory under sustainable management. But recently the ITTO has
issued a new report, Status of International Forest Management (ITTO, 2005) that gives a more
encouraging picture. There has evidently been progress since 1989, when the authors had
trouble finding even one M hectares of sustainably managed natural forests. Instead at least 25
M hectares were identified, and India and Malaysia alone accounted for 40% of that. There is
also greater agreement about which criteria and indicators should be used to assess if a forest
is managed sustainably, and more management-related information is available about forests
in general. The report states that many more forests have management plans, but only 7% of
the 352 M hectares of the natural forests in tropical countries managed to produce timber are
being managed sustainably. Many companies with management plans do not actually follow
them and much of the tropical timber on the market comes from illegal sources. Tables 2.1
and 2.2 and Annex 3.1 and 3.2 show the situation of the management of the Permanent Forest
Estate in the 11 Commonwealth countries that are ITTO members.
Management of the permanent natural forest estate with production function in the eleven
Commonwealth ITTO countries shows that there are high proportions of licensed concession
and of forests with management plans, both natural forest and plantation, although the area of
natural forest believed to be sustainably managed is low. But, as Table 2.3 (below) shows,
apart from Malaysia, there is no Commonwealth ITTO producer country marketing timber from
forests certified under one or other of the schemes. Information on the state of forest
management in other Commonwealth countries has been drawn from FRA 2002,summarised
in Table 2.2 below.
The additional, but usually earlier, information in Table 2.2 shows that some other countries -
not only the developed economies - have a high proportion of their forests under working plans.
But information is still lacking.
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