Accra, Aug. 28, GNA - Ghana is hosting a three-day Tropical Forest Investment Forum for West and Central Africa with the aim of increasing the level of understanding of opportunities and constraints to investment in natural tropical forest.

The forum under the theme: "Issues and Opportunities for Investment in Natural Tropical Forest", would discuss issues such as who the potential investors in natural forest were, how they made investment decisions and what kind of information was needed.

Dr. Manoel Sobral Filho, Executive Director of the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), sponsors of the forum, admitted that the main cause of poor management and forest destruction was poverty.

"It is difficult to make forest conservation a high priority when people struggle to feed their families," he told about 160 participants attending the Forum.

Dr. Filho, however, added that if the forest was left to be destroyed it could lead to environmental problems that poor countries such as those in the sub-region could not solve.

He said it was for such reason that some forest managers were calling for the payment for the global services performed by tropical forest, such as carbon storage and biodiversity protection. "Maybe carbon will become a cashable asset for natural tropical forest, as is being discussed within the scope of the Kyoto Protocol and other forums.

"But there is still a great deal of uncertainty about whether this market segment will actually develop at all and if it does the price that the carbon in natural forests will fetch."

Mr. Filho said it was therefore imperative that advocates of natural forests found ways of making sustainable forest management financially viable and attractive.

He expressed the hope that a viable tropical forest management industry would provide developing countries with the needed benefits such as employment skills, development, export income and rural infrastructure development.

Mr. Filho said biodiversity-based industries, such as ecotourism and pharmaceuticals, had not been able to generate the needed income due to the lack of infrastructure and mechanisms to capture the value of the goods.

Forest management faced many difficulties because there was insufficient knowledge of the resources available and lack of appropriate investment, he said. He said the most rational way of growing timber was in plantations and there was little problem in attracting investments. Madam Esther Obeng Dapaah, Minister of Lands, Forestry and Mines, said Africa's forest faced a number of threats including its use for agriculture, rampant wildfires, excessive logging, fuel wood collection and charcoal production.

These issues, she said, were leading to the diminishing of the forest cover and degradation of the forest in general. She called on ITTO and all the collaborators of the Forum to devise ways of increasing benefit flows to the local communities so that they could conserve the forest in a sustainable manner. The Okyenhene Osagyefo Ofori Panin Amoatia, who chaired the function, said it was pathetic that Africa, the land with the richest natural resources, continued to be faced with deprivation, hunger and poverty.

He called on potential investors to ensure that communities in which they invested were better off at the end of their terms instead of making them worse off.

"If we leave them worse off, then we are no better than the colonialist," he said.

Other collaborating institutions are the World Bank, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), African Development Bank and the Forestry Commission of Ghana. 28 Aug. 07