By FAY DUEGA
A HIGH-level consultant team of the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) is in the country to help with the design of a multi-purpose national forest inventory.
The team, composed of Dr Jean-Paul Lanly and Jorge Malleux, arrived in the country last Jan 13 for a three-week fact-finding mission.
They will carry out a development study focussing on a continuous system of multi-purpose national forest resources assessment and monitoring as a tool for planning and implementing sustainable forest management, scrutinising the situation in the country as a case study.
This is the first time that ITTO was dealing with a project on national forest inventory.
Papua New Guinea is be making history because whatever is devised after this mission is intended for replication in other ITTO-member countries.
The multipurpose forest inventory (MFI) as a tool for sustainable forest management study, which the duo were working on, is the result of a recommendation from an ITTO diagnostic mission that visited PNG last February.
A project proposal was then submitted to the 42nd session of the International Tropical Timber Council held in Port Moresby last May 7 to 12 and funding amounting to US$105,000 (K338,710) was approved by the ITTC for the inventory study.
The ITTO consultants explained that the difference between the traditional forest inventory and this national forest inventory was that this mission would be taking into consideration a wider scope of the different goods and services coming from the forest resource.