The communities of Kavango East and West regions appear to be making inroads in bringing the harvesting of illegal timber under control. 

Chief Forester for Zambezi, Kavango East and West regions, Johannes Niipale attributes the decrease to resolve shown in holding illegal harvesters criminally liable.

Niipale says the Directorate of Forestry decided last year to stop issuing on the spot fines and rather drag culprits to court.

He says this has acted as a deterrent to would-be illegal harvesters, who now fear hefty fines imposed by courts - including imprisonment based on the destruction caused. 

The Chief Forester says cases of illegal harvesting have dropped to only 13 reported last year across the two regions.

This year we only opened seven or eight cases for the two regions so which means it has been declining."

A moratorium on the export of raw timber, he says, has also been helpful in reducing illegal logging.  

" They are required to process them and make them plunks or beam, they call them dem15, the dem15 that's the one that is allowed to be exported so all these products whether it rosewood or kyat or tiique they are required to be processed into reasonable size."    

However, local processing of timber and manufacturing for the furniture sector remains poor. 

Modalities, Niipale says, are to be developed that will allow timber harvesting for local processing and manufacturing.

"We don't want to open timber while we have timber in the farms which might be illegally harvested or it was harvested during the harvesting period but it was not exported so we wanted to make sure that there is nothing in the farms so that we start developing our modality based on the zero baseline."

So far, he says the Rundu VTC and the National Youth Service are the only entities to have expressed interest in acquiring the confiscated timber for processing. 

The NYS timber processing plant at Rundu stands closed, waiting on government approval on its business proposal.

The Kavango regions have up to now recently experienced a high rate of logging, mainly for Asian markets, until the moratorium of raw timber exports was introduced.

Most of the illegal loggers are suspected to be gaining entry and to exit the region via the Tsumkwe-Ncaute road, which has no police checkpoints.