Products

Forest Development & Utilization

Forest development and utilization is one of the pillar area and structured as a key

directorate for the sustainability of the Enterprise. The main activities of this directorate are;-

Forest development
Forest utilization
Development and utilization of NTFP
Forest protection
Participatory forest management with the surrounding communities

Forest Dev't Activities

Seed preparation

This activity starts from tree seed collection of different species and the enterprise has a tree seed processing and storage center, located in Sabata town named as Dima Seed processing and storage center. The Seed center is located 20 km from the capital city of Addis Ababa on the Jimma road. The center supplies tree seeds of for more than 100 tree species, for which germination rate is appropriately tested with fully equipped laboratory tools donated from the Japan government.

Nursery mngt & seedling product

There are basically two types of nurseries, i.e. permanent nursery and short-term
nursery. Most of our enterprise nurseries are permanent Nurseries. One of the major activities of forest development and utilization directorate is production of seedling both for conservation and Commercial purpose. Yearly the enterprise will produce more than 15 million of seedling for afforestation and reforestation program within in the concession area and out of concession for communities especially for out growers.

The enterprise have more than 85 nurseries site. From which now a day 57 nurseries site are functioning to produce 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 seedling per year.

Plantation forests and Trees

Plantation forests can provide most goods and services that are provided by natural forests. These include timber, non-timber forest products, protection of clean water and clean air, soil erosion control, biodiversity, esthetics, carbon sequestration, and climate control. Nevertheless, as the value of environmental services from natural forests is higher than that from forest plantations, the demand for conservation of natural forests is stronger from the government said. But because of forest plantations grow much faster than natural forests, forest plantations are seen as an increasingly important source of timber supply. The enterprise planting an area of more than 3000 ha/year within in his concession area through reforestation and afforestation program

Plantations of non-native species are grown worldwide, and many are more productive (m3 wood/ha/year) than native species. Although less than 5% of the total world forest area, plantations account for nearly 35% of the world’s wood products (FAO, 2011). In our enterprise the plantation area is account for only 2% of the total forest concession area we have. The species our enterprise plant is exotic and dominantly pines and eucalyptus species. These two species have a large percentage of the trees in our plantations. . It is noticeable that our plantations lack of species diversity and structural complexity that limit varieties of habitats to support biological diversity. But we compensate that through conservation of natural forest which accounts more than 97.6 % of our concession areas.

Plantation maintenance

Forest plantations require intensive management inputs, more similar to agriculture than to traditional management of native-species forests; eg, in plantations there are intensive site preparation, weed control, fertilizer use, pest control, relatively frequent uses of heavy machines for harvest and planting with associated impacts on soils. Activities like pruning, thinning are exhaustively will carried out just to increase the quality of the timber in our enterprise.

Forest Utilization

Oromia Forest and wildlife utilize the forest resource of more than 368,000 m3 per Annam for construction and other different purpose and uses 82,000 m3 of logs for lumber production

NTFP (Non timber forest product)

The enterprise also works on the non-timber forest production for many years ago such as Honey Low land Bamboo , Forest Coffee and gum and incense production