Crisis looms for training in forestry

 THE development of professional and technical human resources for the Forestry Sector now done under the umbrella of the PNG University of Technology is total chaos and disarray.  

Currently, there is a serious shortage of qualified and experienced teaching staff at the Lae campus. 

Towards the end of last year, the contracts of the remaining experienced teaching staff were not renewed because of Unitech politics and as a result, the forestry programmes and its students will now suffer. 

Furthermore, starting this year the Bulolo campus will be running its own Diploma in Forestry programme as approved by the university council in June 2015. 

Where are your qualified and experienced academic staff to run both the on -going Forestry Degree/Diploma and the new Technical Forestry Diploma programmes?

The question of quality of forestry education in the last 19 years or so has been seriously questioned particularly by the National Forest Service (NFS) and Timber Industry who are the major employers of the forestry graduates. This concern was expressed during the 2014 Bulolo Forestry Training Seminar. 

How can you talk about quality forestry education when you do not have qualified and experience academic staff to do the job?

The university’s forestry department is thriving on text book lecturers who have just joined the department with very little teaching and/or field experience while some took the teaching job straight after university education.

How do you expect quality forestry education to flow to students given this kind of shallowness in the teaching staff? To make matters worst is the fact that an entomologist is the head of the forestry department. 

How can you talk forestry when a biologist is running the show? 

For anything to happen in a way of forestry academic planning, the head of the only professional forestry training in PNG must be influential enough to dictate to authorities where forestry training should be heading in line with forestry developments in PNG . 

Forestry science is not just science for pure academics but science that must contribute to the national development agenda.

Corrective measures are needed immediately by authorities higher than the university for a permanent solution to the looming crisis . 

Concerned Forester

Lae