Africa-Press – Angola. Specialists from the Forest Development Institute (IDF) and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce defended in Luanda, the promotion of forestry as a way to add value to the timber exploitation chain and mitigate deforestation.
According to IDF industrial wood engineer Cristina Tumba, who was speaking about the wood value chain at the 5th edition of Expo-Indústria, the priority in this industry subsector must be integrated and coordinated with the aim of better serving the citizen and provide a healthy environment for the business.
For him, the incentive to forestry must be a fact, despite the 70 million hectares of native forest existing in the country, with fertile areas that correspond to 55.6% of the country’s surface, with the aim of reinforcing the 54 thousand hectares of planted forests (it was 148 thousand hectares, before independence).
According to the engineer, in addition to the ecological and social benefits, the value chain of wood and the forest itself are multifaceted, as they supply wood and non-wood products.
On the other hand, he said, the wood can also be processed and transformed into panels used in office furniture and also the possibility of filtering wood residues for the manufacture of toys, for biomass, among others.
For his part, the national director of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, César Lopes da Cruz, corroborates the commitment of farmers and industrialists to the forestry business, as it is a branch that prevents and fights deforestation that ends up killing natural species.
For him, this way of planting trees makes the industrialist plant the species that interests him and interests the national and international market, as well as explores and transforms wood, without harming the environment, thus encouraging the green economy.
With this mass process, he added, the country will have wood exploitation in an ecological, controlled and sustained way, with the producer planting his trees to guarantee the wood trade, without deforestation and contributing to the growth of the country’s economy.
Data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) indicate that the forestry sector in Angola has the potential to become, in the medium and long term, one of the main levers of economic, social and environmental development due to the large number of products and services provided by forests, beyond wood.
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