Implementing Agency:
Department For International Development (WNAD)

Managing Institute:
Department For International Development (WNAD)

Project Code: 048-502-001	Start Date: 23/11/1989	End Date: 31/12/1993
Commitment: £77,000	Status: Completed	Type of Funding: Bilateral - TC

Project Objectives:
The role of the Oban Feasibility Study , was to define the actions necessary to create and protect indefinitely the Oban Division of the Park, and to do this it was necessary to address the question of land use around the park. Poorly planned and virtually unsupervised logging is underway in all the forest reserves from out of which the Park is to be created, and other large areas in its immediate vicinity are simultaneously being converted to pulpwood plantations. Although timber inside the park is to be taken out of production, and the area will no longer be available for de-reservation, these very measures will stress the forestry sector and cause increased pressure on the resource elsewhere which may one day be reflected back to consume the Park itself. Solving this problem is the other half of the project, and it should be addressed through a comprehensive re-organisation and re-capitalisation of Cross River State's forestry sector. Meanwhile, however, a more immediate threat is also present. Increasingly steep land is being colonised by farmers growing traditional crops to feed expanding village populations, and for profit at a time of relatively high food prices in Nigeria, and this is not environmentally viable. Roads bisect and surround the Park, and about 40 villages are close enough to the Park to exert significant impact upon it. In these circumstances, unchecked land pressures can be anticipated to destroy most of the Park's forests within one decade. Since the same villages depend for a large part of their income on hunting, trapping and gathering within the forest itself, its destruction in this way will ultimately be self-defeating.