Agbeja, B.O., Department of Forest Resources Management, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Nigeria has a negligble record of private sector participation (PSP) in the forestry sector. The forestry sector tends to be weak, having taken for granted investment potential under the private sector. The study examined the perceptions of stakeholders on incentives to support private forestry in Southwest Nigeria with a view to eliciting support for an alternative to public forestry programme. The specific objective was to identify various incentives for private forestry in the study areas. Binary models were developed using the field data collected from Ekiti, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo States in Southwest Nigeria to evaluate a number of incentives perceived to determine willingness of the stakeholders to support Private Forestry (PF). The binary logit models predict the probability that a respondent will be willing to support PF in relation to independent variables which include presence/absence of Federal and State Financial Assistance (FSFA), presence/absence of International Financial Assistance (IFA), presence/absence of Long Term Lease of Forest Land (LTLFL), Provision of Seedlings /Seeds (PSS), Provision of Loans (PL), Availability of Grants (AG), presence/absence of Technical Assistance (TA) and presence/absence of Market for Environmental Services Incentives (MESI). A total of 5 forestry headquarters, 10 towns and 20 communities were randomly selected for data collection in the five states. A structured questionnaire was employed for the study. Willingness to participate in PF was best predicted by highest odds ratio where presence of LTLFL has an odds ratio of 84.02. This was followed by PL with an odds ratio of 3.81, in the pooled model for the five states. Willingness to support PF appears to be guaranteed where LTLFL and PL for forest management are high. The specific models developed depend on the locations where the data were collected, and therefore should not be applied to areas outside the range of the data. However, the modelling approach is of general applicability and can be used to predict the willingness of the stakeholders support PF in other areas.