Furnished Farmers Fight For Forests

Farmers in Ghana have a boon, a boon with a booming sound, for the newness engulfing their arena is so different. The Government through the Forest Plantation Fund Board holds the position that crop farming and forest tree plantation are not mutually exclusive but can be integrated for the best results.

For a long time, farming has been torn in the flesh of forestry as the cultivation of crops is preceded by land preparation that involved the clearance of vegetative cover before planting. Trees are part of the items that are removed in the process.

Moving away from this practice in 360 degrees, farmers are being slipped into the world of forest management where they are to intercrop food produce with existing plantations. In shoring up forest estates. and not to decimate them, farmers are told to maintain trees in the forest and are to infuse the grove by planting tree seedlings.

 

Since farmers are expected to use cutlasses to weed the undergrowth of plantations before cropping lands, earth-moving machinery that mows everything in sight during land preparation is not allowed under farmers in forest plantations. This means those who are targeted in the exercise are small-scale farmers. The system draws a fence around illegal loggers in forest reserves, and the delineation places farmers on the side of the watchmen. All that farmers are expected to do in the new exercise that began in 2019, is to plant their food crops, and tree seedlings, and blow the whistle on violators.

The new line of action might come up against stiff opposition by fomenters of illegalities whose stock-in-trade is to subjugate human lives to forest resources and so they maim and kill in their various quests. These are threats that call for reinforcement in forest security.

 

Granted the trespass is warded off, and the symbiotic coexistence between farming and forest conservation is in place, soils are to be enriched from the mulch as the routine tree pruning exercise sends foliage to the ground. A dense forest minimizes the impact of climate change and induces the normal rainfall pattern to grow food crops in the plantation fields.

Forestry officials supported by the Forest Plantation Fund Board, have been distributing the seedlings of the teak plant to fill up sparsely populated areas, especially as teak is fire-tolerant. However, in order not to deface the natural grove, a conscious effort is made to create a diverse mix of trees in the locations of regeneration.

 

At Hohoe, the second-largest city in the Volta region, the government supplied over 10 million trees to schools, youths, and households to plant trees under the Green Ghana project that is seeking to restore depleted forests. A Technical Officer of Forestry at Hohoe, Mr. Maxwell Kotia has suggested that Ghana can take advantage of afforestation programs to plant more cocoa seedlings around the country.

 

 

The Ghana Cocobod has as part of its agencies, a cocoa seedling development center that produces seedlings to replenish stocks. According to the technical officer, it will be prudent to replicate cocoa seedling production centers in all cocoa-growing districts, and others, for the multiplication of the cash crop with an annual export revenue of 2 billion dollars.

 

Meanwhile, the clusters implementing the tree planting exercise appeal to the government to increase their monthly stipends. They say, being a Nemophilist or forest dweller or hired to work in the habitation of dangerous animals in the wild is a risky job that deserves good compensation.