The ManicaPost
Minister of Land, Environment and Rural Development, Celso Correia, has confirmed that the 150,000 cubic metres of wood seized so far in “Operation Trunk”, in the north and centre of Mozambique, will be sold to the highest bidder at public auction.“Operation Trunk” was launched in March to check the legality of timber operations. Over 120 timber yards were inspected, and illegal operations were discovered in 75 per cent of them. Many of these illegalities were found in timber yards owned by Chinese citizens.
Speaking to timber operators at a meeting in Maputo recently, Correia said the wood will be sold at auction, and the condition for participation in the auction is that the buyers must be willing to use the wood to make school desks. It is hoped that the seized wood will produce 800,000 desks – this will meet the requirements of the national education system for at least the coming year. Correia’s announcement may go some way towards mollifying legal timber operators who were horrified by his declaration on 4 April that all logging is banned for the next three months (April, May and June). Since the first quarter of the year, January to March, is already a closed season for logging, this means there is now a six-month ban on logging.
This move is intended to provide time to reorganise the timber industry and protect the country’s forests from the ravages of uncontrolled logging. But the timber companies protested that the three-month ban will cause them huge losses.
Correia listened to the complaints but told his audience that the decision for a three-month ban on logging had been taken and would not be changed. What was at stake, he said, was the interests of all Mozambicans and not of this or that individual. Without this measure, he warned, within a couple of years there would be no forests left in Mozambique. “It’s a real problem”, he said, “because there are honest operators who are being prejudiced. We must separate the interest of individuals from the public interest. The moment demands maturity. The results of Operation Trunk reveal a desolate and unacceptable scenario of the devastation of our forests”.
“During Operation Trunk, we found total anarchy in the way forestry operators were working”, Correia continued, “which shows flagrant impunity, and that’s why we decided to suspend for 90 days the start of the forestry exploitation period”.
The ban has been welcomed by environmentalists. Thus, the coordinator of the Forest Programme of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Mozambique, Rito Mabunda, congratulated the government on the ban.
He believed that the three-month period for reorganising the timber industry would allow for sustainable exploitation of forestry resources.
He warned that it was imperative to strengthen inspection activities to prevent illegal loggers continuing to cut down trees during the three-month ban.
Both Operation Trunk and the three-month ban only affect the central and northern provinces. That is because there has already been severe deforestation in the southern provinces of Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane, where there are no substantial hardwood forests left. — AIM
