CONFAB ON MAHOGANY

 The Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Barbara Serwaa Asamoah has hinted that the remaining forest reserve of Ghana is in serious danger due to certain human factors. These include over exploitation, illegal logging, conversion of forest reserves into farmlands, wildfires, and illegal mining resulting in deforestation and degradation. Similarly, tree species such as Mahogany are getting extinct. According to Madam Serwaa Asamoah, up to the 1950's, 70 percent of Ghana's total annual export was made up of mahogany. However, currently mahogany wood constitute only nine point zero-four percent of Ghana's total export earnings. The Deputy Minister was speaking at the opening of an international conference on the sustainable production of Mahogany species in Plantations in Tropical Africa. The four-day Conference was jointly organised by the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the International Tropical Timber Organisation and the Thunen-Institute of Forest Genetics of Germany.  Madam Serwaa Asamoah noted that Ghana exported 18 thousand, 431 Cubic metres of sawn mahogany in 2010, earning the country about 11 point two million Euros  while in 2012, a little over nine million Euros was accrued to the economy from the export of the same wood specie. The Deputy Minister stressed the critical need for the country to develop sustainable measures to protect the remaining natural resources and in particular our timber species such as mahogany. The Chairman for the Conference, Professor Nana Frimpong Mensah of the Faculty of Renewable Natural Resources of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology expressed delight that indigenous farmers have been involved in a Mahogany plantation project being undertaken by the project partners.