Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa - PROFOR

Charcoal became more costly to produce and to get to the market, which reduced demand, but
created good opportunities for intermediaries to capture extra revenues, usually from bribes (box
3.1). With production pushed out of the legal domain, the forestry department had less control
over the process. It became problematic for the forest department to collect stumpage fees even
if charcoal was made in forest reserves, nor was it able to advise or train charcoal producers on
woodland management and charcoal production because this would have been illegal. More
recently, Kambewa et al. (2007) also conclude that current efforts in Malawi to discourage charcoal
making are expensive and ineffective.
Much of the recent literature on forest governance confi rms that a plethora of national-level
regulations does little more than improve the ability of petty offi cials to extract informal payments.
Such informal taxation results in lower profi t margins to producers and traders. In an impassioned
report on the Mozambique timber market, Mackenzie (2006) concluded that offi cial agencies were
presiding over and colluding with abuses that makes a “mockery of the notion of governance:
taking bribes for issuing licenses, approving management plans, concessions and export permits,
BOX 3.1. ISSUES RELATED TO REVENUE GENERATION FROM THE FORESTRY SECTOR
Informal payments to officials
In Malawi, it was estimated that “private taxation” of charcoal traders diverted US$700,000 per year from
public revenues (Kambewa et al. 2007). In Tanzania, marketing studies routinely showed that forestry tax
compliance was on the order of 1 percent to 20 percent, and that the forgery of key documents (with the
evident complicity of local government agents) was common (Kobb 2001).
Low levels of official revenue collection
In Mozambique it is estimated that in the Maputo area, a mere 1 percent of the potential fees and licenses
were actually collected (SEI 2002). In Zambia the estimate is about 10 percent. In Tanzania, royalties
from natural forests totaled about US$1.2 million per annum 1999. Since Tanzania has roughly 34 million
hectares of forests, revenues are equivalent to around US$0.04 per hectare of forest (Kobb 2001).
Incentives for local governments not to devolve revenue collection
Devolution often begins by giving local governments the right to collect a greater share of forest revenues.
These revenues can become an important source of “untied” income for local governments (Blomley
2006). This causes a potential conflict of interest as the same bodies hold the key to further devolving
rights of forest management and use (and revenue collection responsibilities) to local communities.
Rights to revenue collection
At the national level, the connection between the right to collect revenues (by forest departments) and
the responsibility for management (again, by forest departments) is seldom made. The question, then,
is why the public sector has the right to extract rents from what are essentially unmanaged woodlands
(but which are held in trust by government). Forestry, then, becomes a mining operation, where outside
interests are granted the rights to exploit a resource on payment of royalties, but have no responsibility
to encourage sustainable production. Few other productive sectors operate in this way. Government’s only
rights to forest product revenue were based on a colonial designation of an area as a forest reserve, not
on any legitimate right derived from protection or use.
38 MANAGING THE MIOMBO WOODLANDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA