Participants adopt action plan on wildfires

Dormaa Ahenkro (B/A), Aug 8, GNA - The first in the series of three-day stakeholder workshops organized by the Forest Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG) for some local communities in five forest districts in the country has ended at Dormaa Ahenkro. The workshop adopted a nine-point community based fire management action plan for the 2007/8 fire season.

Key wildfire stakeholders including the Forest Research Institute, Dormaa District Assembly, Ghana National Fire Service and local community heads will implement the action plan jointly. A main focus of the document is to establish mechanisms aimed at re-organising anti-wildfire committees and voluntary squads and to provide them with adequate community support, logistics and motivation to enable them not only to protect the remaining forests but also to restore degraded lands.

Another key aspect of the action plan is to erect early warning systems and to co-ordinate awareness programmes on wildfires in order to offset duplication of activities.

Squadron Leader Ben Anane Asamoah (rtd), District Chief Executive, appealed to communities in the district to harness resources to prevent and manage wildfires that had increased over the years as a result of climatic changes triggered mostly by human activities.

Squadron Leader Asamoah said wildfires had damaged land and property in the district, pushing the youth towards urban areas in search of jobs.

"The strength of every community lies in the exuberance of its youth rather than the worn-out adults but our case is the reverse, where negative factors such as wildfires and obsolete customary practices continue to push back the youth and their values." Dr. Dominic Blay, the project's national coordinator, said apart from protecting timber, the project was also geared towards empowering the communities to increase access to non-timber forest products such as snails, bush meat, mushroom and canes.

He said FORIG Project did not come to replace existing wildfire management strategies but rather to complement their good aspects and make inputs where they are lacking.

Mr. Lawrence Damnyag of the FORIG said in 2003, wildfire destroyed food crops and other materials worth 290 million cedis (GHc29, 000) in each of the five beneficiary districts of the project. He said there was a downward trend in activities of fire communities due mainly to lack of logistics, motivation and efficient control systems.

Mr. William Dumenu, also of FORIG, said there was gross incoherence in laws enacted to control the wildfire menace. He said most of the laws were shrewd and flawed towards industrial and domestic fire management only and stressed the need for structures and systems that would ensure stakeholder participation in wildfire prevention and management processes at all levels.

The workshop's 90 participants unanimously appealed to the country's legislature and the ministry in charge of the environment to open a debate on the formulation of a one-stop wildfire policy that would embrace all stakeholders and relevant processes to address the fires once and for all.

They also attributed local authorities' apparent impotence in dealing with wildfire culprits to lack of gazetted bye-laws and called on Parliament to speed up the process and endorse all proposed bye-laws without pruning any parts as it happened to Dormaa district's proposed by-laws recently.