RUNDU – The Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism plans to start issuing permits for the transportation of harvested timber but with strict conditions.

The conditions will be communicated on various platforms, the ministry’s spokesperson Romeo Muyunda told Nampa on Tuesday.

Muyunda said businessmen in the local timber industry have been calling on the government to allow them to resume the marketing and transportation of already harvested timber. “We are going to communicate the conditions under which the operations of timber have to take place at a later stage,” he said.

Last November, President Hage Geingob announced that government had lifted the ban on the marketing and transportation of harvested timber, which was implemented due to an increase in illegal timber harvesting. This also included exports.

The operations, however, stopped in March this year due to the Covid-19 outbreak but have not returned to normal despite the gradual easing of virus restrictions.

“Everything has resumed except timber. The charcoal industry, which is also under forestry, has resumed with exporting and transporting as we are speaking,” local businessman George Shikongo said in an interview on Tuesday.

He said, after the president announced the lifting of the ban, things had gone well.

“We started exporting and transporting the timber from farms – with the transport permits given to us – to Walvis Bay. Things went well until the pandemic broke out,” he said.

Shikongo stated that the halt in operations has affected their employees. “We have now been reported to the labour court by our workers, who have not been paid, while the timber is rotting away on our farms. We feel we are being discriminated against,” he said.

Meanwhile, Muyunda said the hold-up in the resumption of timber trading was due to the fact that the ministry is working on promoting the local trade of timber, exploring enterprises that can be started in terms of producing and processing timber to create employment for locals.

– Nampa