Forestry Commission to train more technical officers

• Published date: 13 February 2019
• Publication title: Business and Financial Times

The Forestry Commission (FC) is to recruit graduates, Diplomat-holders and Senior High School (SHS) leavers to be trained as Technical officers, to augment the current ageing and inadequate officers across the country to meet demand in the timber and afforestation industry for productivity.

'The inability of the Commission to sustain its training programmes for Technical Officers (TOs) over the years, due to constraints, has indeed created a deficit of technical requirements in the field,' Mrs. Edith Abroquah, Director of Operations of Forest Services Division (FSD) of the Forestry Commission said in Accra.

According Mrs. Abroquah, the duties of these technical officers are indispensable and cannot compromised by any circumstances. For instance, among the functions of the technical officers are: to give professional guidancee to persons who want to establish plantations; determine soil fertility, types of species; where to get them from, and spacing of the seedlings during planting.

The Technical Officers also guides plantation owners to create fire-belts around their plantations against bushfire hazards etc. They are also to assess maturity of trees before they are felled by contractors, and ensure standardisation in the industry.

On forest...