Denunciation of Illegal Logging Heightens

A workshop on external forest monitoring held in Yaounde on November 12, 2013.

The fight against illegal logging in Cameroon constitutes an important activity and government's policy in the forestry sector. The phenomenon does not only deprive government and forest communities from getting the correct revenue, but equally contributes to the extinction of some species of wood in the forest.

The Centre for Environment and Development (CED), a Yaound-based civil society organization has said denunciation is the way out for defaulters to be investigated, charged to court and eventually pay for their act by filling State's coffers. To accomplish the mission, CED through its support project for external monitoring of forest activities saw the need to train and involve local forest communities to denounce illegal actors.

According to the Project Manager, Patrice Kamkuimo Plam, the outcome has been fruitful. "The forest communities have succeeded in denouncing many actors than we thought. Though after denouncing and submitting to the forest administration, sanction procedures are slow, some cases have been followed up by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife in collaboration with its technical partner, the Independent Observer.

Others that might implicate top government officials die a natural death," he explained. There is need to put continuous pressure on forest administrators to use information from forest duelers in order to improve the control of illegal logging, Moise Kono, Project Officer added.

It is regrettable that the indigenous people work so hard to monitor and ensure sustainable exploitation of the forest get nothing in return since the 1994 Forestry Low does not provide for. For the Project Manager, civil societies in their proposals for the revision of the Forestry Law, have spelt out that in any sanction meted against illegal logging, the forest communities should have a share of the money in order to encourage them to continue denouncing perpetrators.