Moscow. Jul 27, 2009. /Lesprom Network/. Achieving long-term development in West Africa requires much more than just exploiting the region’s natural resources. Sustainable development would entail integrating livelihood, climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives with agriculture, as reported by the Business Day paper.

In many parts of West Africa, tropical forests are disappearing at a much faster rate than many of governments and their agencies are willing to admit. While some may argue that this is not peculiar to the region, findings indicate that the problem is more endemic in sub-Saharan Africa than in Asia and Latin America and the Carribbeans. Africa’s forest and woodland of 1,339 million hectares, constitutes about 20 per cent of the world’s total.

While in Africa, the population density relative to forest area is close to the world’s average, the deforestation rate is four times the world’s average. Low government priority assigned to the forestry sector as seen from the low budgetary allocation to the sector, poor enforcement of regulations, lack of incentives, in particular to local communities and the private sector, ill-defined property rights and the treatment of forest resources as public goods, among others, have been identified as factors inhibiting the implementation of sustainable forest management practices in Africa.

According to a report released May 2009 in Cameroun, governments control over tropical forests account significantly for the failure to stop deforestation in parts of Africa. More than 70 per cent of the continent’s remaining tropical forests, according to the report, are located in Central Africa’s Congo Basin, but civil conflicts, inadequate governance, and lack of action on land reform put much of the forest area at risk. The International Tropical Timber Organisation, ITTO, the United Nations agency which authored of the report, warns that failure to ensure land rights for local communities in the forests of Central and West Africa will impede efforts to check deforestation.

Action on land tenure could help to halt deforestation, slow climate change and alleviate poverty, says the report, entitled Tropical Forest Tenure Assessment: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities. The study reveal that less than two percent of Africa’s tropical forests are owned by or designated for use by the region’s forest communities and indigenous groups compared to nearly one-third of all forests in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific.