Our Teak Plantation Location

These ideal growing conditions are also complemented by an excellent conservation program that has been implemented to protect the hardwood forests of Ghana. This started with a protective forest policy in 1948 to protect the country’s forest reserve estates and continued throughout the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s as the country took on a massive replanting of their forest reserves. In 1994 this was updated with the Forest and Wildlife Policy which was specifically concerned with protecting the environment and using Ghana’s forests and wildlife sustainably. This was to be done by involving local people in the management of their own natural resources so that they could also benefit from those resources. This was done by a forestry plan which set out a way forward to fund the conservation and management of resources via a donor funded development program, referred to as the Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP.) This 1994 NRMP brought with it a wide range of sector reforms and strategic initiatives all of which aimed to put in place better governance of the forest resources as well as introducing local involvement and poverty reduction, and most importantly, transparency into Ghana’s wildlife and forest sectors. In practice what this meant was that from the 90’s onwards Ghana was able to release degraded forest reserve lands to private sector companies that had been approved by the Forestry Commission. The forestry commission will vet these companies and choose which ones to endorse, based on their business plans and how they intend to manage reforestation. If approved, these companies would then be granted a licence to manage an area of forest which would the Forestry Commission monitors (with regular visits) to ensure it is keeping within the agreed plans for reforestation. This process of replanting and controlled commercial reforestation is still in place today, despite the fact that it is a slow and has, in the past, taken a long time for companies to see a return on their investment. In recent times Ghana has recognised this and their Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources have now put in place a number of incentives and financial mechanisms to encourage more financial investment into their forest plantation developments.