WORKING GROUP 4 
FRANCIS 
203 
control this inundation and, providing the effluent of a pulp and paper plant 
were treated to make it pure, the water could be used afterwards for irrigation 
purposes. But the engineering works, water and hydroelectric power installa 
tion and the erection of an integrated pulp and paper plant involve very 
heavy capital investment; of the order of millions of dollars. An alternative 
is to use the various resources of this area for the production of sawn wood 
and other industrial wood products, e.g. packaging material for citrus and 
other agricultural crops which would involve far less capital investment and 
which would be a more labour intensive industry and therefore provide more 
and less skilled employment, but which might not be so attractive from the 
country’s viewpoint when taking into account the foreign exchange balance 
of the country; since pulp and paper imports are relatively high value products 
in comparison with industrial wood products. If is obvious that an assessment 
of this kind has to be carried out before a decision can in fact be made on 
what type of forest industry should be established. And if we now take the 
factors involved in pre-investment surveys and relate them to the present 
techniques of obtaining the necessary information in the most economic man 
ner, you will see where the present techniques prove satisfactory and where 
there are still gaps in our methods which need to be remedied. 
Raw material supplies 
The traditional method of obtaining information on forest resources has 
been to carry out what the North Americans term “timber cruising” and what 
is known in many English speaking parts of the tropics as “forest enumeration”. 
This consists of carrying out of field sampling, even without benefit of aerial 
photographs, on a systematic grid basis. Depending on the intensity of sam 
pling and the amount of information required this can give a valuable indica 
tion of the forest resources. It naturally depends on the efficiency and reliability 
of the staff involved, but many of the developing countries have based their 
forest management and forest development on the results of these systematic 
surveys with satisfactory results. The great draw-back to this method is not 
only that it is very costly, even where labour is cheap, but that it is so slow 
in operation. The better the forest, the more recording and measuring that has 
to be done, and the slower the work. In Ghana, for example, where this 
technique has been refined by the big ex-patriate timber firms to the stage 
where they carry out 100 percent assessments of all mature tree species in their 
timber concessions; they cannot keep far enough ahead of exploitation opera 
tions to be able to do the amount of forward planning which they, and the 
government, would like to carry out. These are mainly physical limitations, 
the difficulties of access in dense tropical forests, the necessity to cut every yard 
of the way, the poor visibility in the forest and the length of time it takes to 
measure and identify individual large trees. The cost of this operation by 
ground methods alone is currently quoted at about $ 2.50 per hectare, a high 
cost, yet this is well worthwhile, and the companies engaged in this work 
consider it to be money well spent. The solution which should be obvious