Agriculture Minister Erasmo Muhate unveiled the survey results in Maputo on Wednesday. The inventory, he said, provided "valuable data about the extent of forest resources, their composition in terms of tree species, the commercial amounts of wood, and the distributions of these resources throughout the country".
The survey took two years to compile, and cost about 2.5 million US dollars, mainly provided through an Italian grant.
Previous forest surveys, in 1980 and 1994, have been less ambitious. The survey document distributed at the Wednesday ceremony described them as "basically exploratory inventories, with limited field work".
But the new inventory has produced detailed maps of Mozambique's vegetation cover, based on satellite images. These were backed up by field visits throughout the country. A representative sample of 650 forest areas were surveyed, to provide detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of forest resources.
The inventory, said Muhate, "will facilitate planning, aimed at the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources".
In addition to the 70 per cent of the land (or 54.8 million hectares) that is classified as forested or wooded, 12 per cent is grassland, 15 per cent is used for agriculture, and three per cent is classed as "other areas".
The most heavily forested areas are north of the Zambezi river. 77 per cent of Niassa province (9.4 million hectares) is forested and 61.7 per cent (4.8 million hectares) of Cabo Delgado.
The provinces with most forest loss are Maputo and Inhambane in the south, and Nampula in the north. Only just over a third of these three provinces is forested.
The current rate of deforestation is 0.58 per cent annually - which means that Mozambique is losing 219,000 hectares of forest and woodland per year.
Ministry officials admit that this is worrying - but note that this rate of deforestation is lower than the average rate of 0.8 per cent per year in sub-Saharan Africa, or 0.7 per cent a year in southern Africa.
The lowest rate of deforestation is in Niassa (0.22 per cent per year), and the highest in Maputo province (1.67 per cent per year).
Most of Mozambique's deforestation is not caused by commercial logging. The Ministry's National Directorate of Land and Forests points to two main culprits - subsistence agriculture, and the trade in wood fuel.
Most peasant agriculture relies on clearing land, using it for a couple of years, and then clearing more land. This is particularly destructive, if uncontrolled bush fires are used to clear the land.
The use of firewood and charcoal for cooking has particularly devastating effects near the main cities: it is Maputo city's demand for charcoal that has resulted in the high deforestation rate in Maputo province.
The inventory also works out a figure for "annual admissible logging" - or how much wood commercial operators can remove from the forests on a sustainable basis.
Two models are used - one gives an annual admissible logging figure of 515,700 cubic metres of wood, and the other 640,500 cubic metres.
This is much more wood than the commercial operators currently extract. So far, the Ministry has been working with a round figure for admissible logging of 500,000 cubic metres - but the licensed operators do not cut down anywhere near that number of trees.
According to the Ministry's figures, the operators asked for a quota of 177,158 cubic metres in 2006, and proved unable to fulfil that quota - they removed slightly less than 145,000 cubic metres of wood.
Of course, these figures do not include illegal logging, but the Ministry believes this can be brought under control - particularly since local communities receive 20 per cent of the fees paid by legal operators, which gives them a strong incentive to denounce illegal ones to the authorities.
The licensed operators themselves are quick to spot any unauthorised logging in their concessions. One licensed operator in Sofala province told AIM that last week he had detected illegal activity in his concession area, and had immediately contacted the ministry and the police.
SOURCE: AIM
