by Gina Maka’a
Solomon Islands has lost millions of dollars in log export revenue over the last 15 years due to lack of monitoring and compliance checks, the nation’s top forestry administrator has admitted.
To address the issue, Richard Raomae, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Forestry and Research, said they’ve kick-started a major exercise to monitor and check all log exports.
“This is not a new issue,” Raomae, who was appointed to the top job recently, said in a statement this afternoon.
“It’s the continuing reduction of the ministry’s budget and the lack of serious consideration in terms of incentives that resulted in this loss of revenue,” he added.
Raomae took action after Finance minister Manasseh Sogavare sharply criticized the Ministry of Forest and Research in parliament for failing to address unaccounted revenue from log exports.
Sogavare urged the ministry to take immediate action to address these discrepancies and ensure proper tracking and accountability.
Raomae admitted the failure to address the issue over the past decade, and added that the situation has resulted in losses to both the Government and landowners.
“I believe that the country is losing millions of dollars in revenue both to the SIG in terms of export duty and the resource owners in terms of royalties.
“The ministry should have addressed this over the last 10 years or so to ensure that revenue generated from the forestry sector reflects the true value of our logs export.
“And that both the Government and resource owners receive maximum benefit from our forestry resources.”
Raomae explained that the log export monitoring and compliance checks exercise they are undertaking will include activities such as 10 percent volume checks to ensure less discrepancies in log scaling, and 100 percent check during loading to ensure consistency in approved consignments.
He added it would also include species check to ensure correct log species are recorded because different log species have different determined value.
“This will enable quality and compliance checking when doing log grading.
“Maintaining the status quo on these very important procedures is paramount, thus frequent field audits on active concessions is a must in capturing these losses in revenue,” Raomae said.
He said proper log export monitoring actually stopped way back in 2009 when the AusAid funded forestry management program that supported the ministry in quality control and monitoring of the logging industry ended.
“Since then, the ministry failed to implement these key functions due to limited government support to the ministry’s budget, as well as repeated delays in enabling key logistic components including fuel to ensure timely attendance to ships loading logs in various parts of the country.
“Ceasing of overtime allowances for the field officers who should be out there to carry out the monitoring process also contributed to the situation.”
Raomae said their priority now is to ensure that the ministry achieves between 70-80 percent of the 10 percent log volume checks during the remaining quarters of this year.
“This should not only be a 100-day program but ongoing activity that needs support in terms of budget increase, timely provision of key logistic components as well as reinstatement of overtime incentives for field officers.”
Logging has been the mainstay of the Solomon Islands economy for decades. Round log export remains the number one foreign exchange earner for the country.
China has been the major market for Solomon Islands’ round logs.
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