African Green Footprints

The goals of the forestry, effort will be to invest in commercially yielding forests.  This is broken down into three categories:

1.   The purchase of large scale distressed plantations which have existing building and plant infrastructure at low real estate prices and planting non indigenous species for high economic yields.  Our target is to provide power poles to the electricity development projects throughout the country and timber for the local and export markets.   Within the first 10 years our target is to have over 10,000 ha of forests under cultivation.  These projects will be certified to yield tradable Certified Emission Reduction (CER) certificates under the Clean Development Mechanism programs.

2.  The protection of indigenous forests by purchase where possible and afforestation of areas that have been degraded. Within the first 10 years our target is to own and have under protection over 250,000 ha of indigenous forests.
   

3.   The small scale commercial planting of trees by the rural populations surrounding the project areas.  Our objective is to target 27,000 self sustaining, small scale commercial tree growers within the first 10 years.

African Green Footprints encourages biotic and economic diversity with a dynamic mixture of plantation grown, income generation forests and indigenous rainforest trees.  Our social emphasis revolves around organized small scale commercial agriculture production and funding small scale income generating projects in the rural communities surrounding the project areas.

• Our agriculture objective is to increase food production at the rural level by supporting existing farmers, organizing traditional agricultural cooperatives and developing microfinance, providing agriculture loans and other financial services.  The loans will be monitored through our agriculture extension system to ensure that crop production is carried out on a commercial basis.  During the first three years we will concentrate on providing and selling food on the internal market.  Our long term objective is to also develop high value export crops.
  

• Our carbon offset development program is focused expanding our large scale carbon offset generation plantations.  These plantations will be certified to yield tradable Certified Emission Reduction (CER) certificates under the Clean Development Mechanism programs.
  

The main emphasis of all of our projects will be to ensure significantly better financial returns by developing and investing in the local economy as we regenerate public and private forests in the region.  Our educational effort will develop a local awareness of the mechanism for wealth creation from carbon sequestration, responsible silviculture and an awareness of the local benefits of green house gas reduction programs.