Accra, Jan 10, GNA - A Senior Programmes Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Saturday advised the government to review its re-afforestation programme with emphasis on the establishment of teak plantations in degraded forest areas.

Mr Carl Fiatsi, who gave the advise in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, explained that teak plantation within high forest areas pose a great danger to biodiversity concentration.

Research on teak had revealed that it had adverse effect on the environment by reducing biodiversity to about 10 per cent of the original plant species.

Mr Fiatsi said teak plantations are able to colonise forest areas and displace indigenous species, which could be lost forever. "Some of the lost plant species are good medicinal plant, indigenous timber species and even habitats of some animal species".

Mr Fiatsi suggested that forestry development programmes related to teak plantations could be promoted in the Savannah area where biodiversity is low and the plant is on record to do.

He said the economic value of teak on the world market had revived the interest of plantation developers into the alien specie, introduced around the 1950s, adding that, emphasis in it was due to the enormous foreign exchange the country realised in the 1990's.

"Economic gains should not be at the expense of the nation's biodiversity resources, since Ghana signed the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 and ratified it in 1994."

Mr Fiatsi warned against the tendency to associate biodiversity with the direct economic values that could be derive from a plant. He explained that the practice could indirectly jeopardize the ability of the environment to sustain plant life.

"This attitude must be stopped," he stressed.