GOLD COAST REPORT ON FORESTS. i)7 



After a descent of something like 800 or 900 feet the broken 

 country comprising the basins of the Tmoi and Birrim rivers is 

 reached. Generally speaking it is well wooded and contains the 

 remains of what must once have been very fine forests rich both 

 in cedars and mahoganies, and comparable in many respects with 

 the best forests of Fpper Sefwi and Western Ashanti. Now, 

 however, they have been extensively cut up by farms in which 

 cocoa is the dominant crop. All things considered, it is perhaps 

 just as well to sacrifice these forests in the interests of agriculture 

 as the locality is eminently suited to the cultivation of cocoa, 

 kola, rubber-yielding plants, &c., that require a humid atmos- 

 phere for their best development. But in doing so it should not 

 be overlooked that there is a limit to the amount of forest that can 

 be destroyed with impunity for that purpose. Their complete 

 extermination would entail the eventual failure of the very crops 

 that it is proposed to cultivate on a large scale. In a tropical 

 country like this it is imperative that the woods clothing the 

 crests of the hills and the higher slopes, especially near the sources 

 of the more important streams, should be strictly conserved, and 

 on no account whatever should the slopes of the hills facing the 

 dry open forest country be denuded of vegetation that is, if it is 

 intended to devote the districts of Kwahu> and Eastern Akyem to 

 the cultivation of crops of the nature indicated above. In any 

 case, whether such crops fail or not in the end, the destruction of 

 the forests clothing the hills will adversely affect the water-supply 

 of the country to such an extent as may bring disaster to locali- 

 ties remote from the area in which the damage was originally 

 done. No agricultural crops, however densely they are planted, 

 can ever replace, as regulators of the water-supply, the forests 

 now clothing the hills. 



I am sorry to say that a great deal of damage has already been 

 done to these forests, as, for example, along the slopes of the 

 Abetifi Hills facing the Afram Plain, the slopes of the Aburi 

 Hill system facing the Pram Pram and Accra plains, and, so I 

 am informed, of the slopes of the hills adjacent to the Krobo 

 Plains. 



Grass, that harbinger in tropical West Africa of the doom of 

 the evergreen forests (on which the water-supply of the country is 

 so dependent), has established itself on several of these hills, even 

 on some of the higher peaks of the Kwahu system, as, for instance, 

 near the important town of Obo, and it will only be a matter of 

 years, if the forests continue to be destroyed, for it to take such 

 possession of the soil as to practically exclude all evergreen vege- 

 tation. With the grass come the annual fires of the dry season 

 and the damage thus becomes accentuated from year to year, till 

 a complete change in the vegetation and climate becomes estab- 

 lished. The different stages in this change can be easily observed 

 along the Aburi- Accra road, where excellent examples exist of 

 the transformations resulting from the reckless destruction of the 

 forests. 



It is hard to conceive any more difficult or serious problem, 

 affecting the general welfare of the country, than that which now 

 confronts the Administration in connection with the preservation 

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