 Hello from Center for International Forestry Research, C4. I'm here on the campus and I'm sorry I can't be with you in Johannesburg for the mid-session on Prunus africana, but I do welcome the opportunity to be able to share with you the results of some of our research on the species. Some of you, if not all of you have seen our PowerPoints over the last year or so looking at and condensing, distilling the research results that we've been generating for over the last few years and we have a fairly strong message that we'd like to convey about the sustainability of prunus africana to you this afternoon. Prunus africana is a very interesting species, occurs in a genus of over 200 species but is the only representative found on the African continent. It occurs primarily in isolated montane populations across tropical african Madagascar and these populations are isolated to the extent where the populations themselves are both genetically and chemically distinct making each individual population incredibly important for conservation and for genetic genetic conservation as well. The species is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN and is also listed on CITES appendix 2. So there's a level of protection across the continent. However the species is threatened due to habitat loss, due to clearing for farmland particularly in some of the more populated areas of montane forest and future impacts predicted due to climate change are being recorded by a number of authors with these montane forest fragments being particularly susceptible to climate change. The commercial trade in prunus africana originated from its herbal local and traditional use for various ailments but it's used primarily as a remedy for benign prostate hyperplasia and this affects more than 60% of men over over 60 was a slight swelling of the prostate and the herbal remedies provided by prunus are one of the few on the market that is relatively efficient. However since 1970 prunus africana bark harvest is shifted from subsistence uses to a much more large scale to feed a growing international trade and a trade that's worth roughly 200 million dollars a year. There are very few alternative products to prunus africana although there are some including soil parmato from the United States and there are many emerging markets particularly in Asia and China and India in particular the demand for prunus africana products has been reported to be increasing. So in terms of the history of trade of Cameroon this slide shows how the quotas have changed over time. You can see the results of the EU export ban in 2007 leading to a zero quota and all the way up to last year where roughly a thousand tons of bark were exported from Cameroon. So in terms of sustainability they have been considerable efforts to try and manage prunus sustainably in the wild and Mount Cameroon in particular has been a model and there's been major investment in management and monitoring plans since 1990 and stimulated by the 2007 trade ban and subsequent national management plan there's been major efforts in ensuring they've been considerable inventory, inventories undertaken but also management regimes developed based on these particular initiatives. However there still remains a major disconnect between policy and practice and an example of this is the annual sustainable bark yields have varied enormously and the quotas have varied enormously and recommendations have been in orders of magnitude different in terms of what constitutes sustainable and you can actually see from this slide that the Mount Cameroon community harvest of prunus africana bark was only 57 tons in 2002 because that's all they could actually find. In terms of the national management plan this is commissioned by FAO to C4 and we led the development of this management plan with a number of partners but this really as the lead author of the report acknowledges and this force actors to work together to brick a large new governance arrangements which basically meant that people who were not working on the prunus africana issue and management were working together and previously hadn't had much experience in doing so one of the major problems that we had internally was some of the methodologies related to inventory techniques and quota setting were not as robust as they perhaps should have been and we agreed internally that from an institutional perspective this brick a large was not good enough in terms of developing a much more cohesion and cogent management plan and harvesting system for prunus africana because of that there were many reservations about the poor quality of the report and we internally recommended that it would not should not be released but it was it was released to onto the FAO website and became a tool for advocacy and lobbying for those who had vested interest in maintaining the wild harvest of prunus africana. So in terms of who benefits there's been a lot of polemic written about the livelihood value of prunus africana to harvesters and you can see from this slide that there are very few active harvesters on Mount Cameron and the benefit per person represents less than one dollar a day. Alternatively the price per kilo the free on-board price is six dollars and this accrues primarily to one company who have a relatively tight monopoly on the export of prunus africana and last year they this represented a profit of sorry in 2012 this represented a profit of almost six million dollars. So the cost of sustainable management versus the actual benefits are interesting to look at. We have estimated that the cost of the inventory that was undertaken on Mount Cameron alone is actually twice the income of the bark harvest itself so essentially donor aid is being used to subsidize the private sector and this inventory was only possible because of external donor funding which I've identified the German Development Bank primarily. So why is it that why would we subsidize an activity that is both potentially unsustainable and has poor livelihood benefits when there are many more livelihood activities that could be supported in the region. We go to the issue which I think is fundamental to the entire argument of wild harvest versus cultivation is wild bark harvesting unsustainable. Bark harvest is a shock from which many prunus trees do not recover particularly because of the scraping of the cambial layer which doesn't allow the new bark to grow back. The demographic structure of natural stands shows very low representation of mature trees and this is primarily because many trees were felled during the 1990s in the in the gold rushes it was referred to at the time to export and exploit as much prunus africana bark as possible and the overexploitation rate is actually more than 90% in many of the studied villages in western Cameron and all of these figures are supported by scientific studies. Work of my own and Charles Taco in the late 90s showed that significant crown death and senescence happened in 80% of trees five years post harvest so we we actually assert there is no scientific evidence to support that the supposed sustainable two-quarters harvesting method that has been propagated is sustainable. And here on this slide you can see three images of examples of where wild harvesting is impacting the residual stands of prunus africana. These are taken in Bioko and Akatoragini. The picture on the left shows a species an individual rather that has been harvested three years previously and shows significant crown death and this also affects reproductive activity as well which just counts for the low regeneration on Bioko in particular. The center slide image shows a cut stump and the removal of entire individuals is a common practice in some harvesting areas particularly the forest frontier and the third slide shows that once bark is removed the remaining stem is susceptible to a stem borer and it actually infiltrates and penetrates the the main body of the stem and may or may not contribute to the crown death that you can see in the left hand side image as well. And this stem borer often leads to long-term senescence and death of the individual. So it's cultivation the answer. Now prunus africana can be very successfully propagated by leafy cuttings and my colleagues at aircraft have done a lot of work on this and even at the lower current low price of the actual bark and cultivation is a better economic option in terms of income but also for the labor expended by local people. The planting of prunus africana in agroforestry systems is currently compatible with many existing agricultural systems in much of its range and because of that has been extensive planting of prunus africana in western Cameroon and there's been a recent inventory of prunus on farmland in and around Mount Cameroon and it's shown that there are large quantities of prunus africana stock still available at the on farm site basically and as you can see from the the figure on the right in terms of value to the the farmer compared to the harvester cultivation actually much more profitable to local people than actually going out into the forest and harvesting directly. In terms of site east cultivation and trade what we want to present to this particular meeting is that we want to basically identify that local farmers have been cultivating prunus africana since basically the 1970s through various incentive schemes but are basically just courage in doing so by lack of access to markets and we've met many farmers in the field who say that if they can't sell their product they'll actually just fell the species and use the timber for other purposes. Societies need to recognize that conservation through cultivation can and should happen with prunus africana as is the case with other products such as orchids and crocodiles. So home farming of these these particular commodities can actually increase profits but also reduce significant pressure on the wild resource. As I mentioned cultivation can bring higher income to more people with considerably less effort and particularly when compared to sustaining the wild harvest and we believe that effort should focus on phasing out wild harvest in the long term and focusing more on cultivation particularly of on farm material. So in terms of recommendations from others GIZ and the government Cameroon put together a very neat framework describing how farmers could exploit and sell prunus bark from their farms and I think they should be followed up and Andrew Quota for the exploitation commercialization of prunus from Mount Cameroon in particular should be proposed to Societies for Approval and this should be scaled up to other areas of production and I think that we should be focusing more on domestication and cultivation of prunus in farms, plantations and community forests which are managed by local people instead of focusing on purported sustainable wild harvest in protected areas and other areas that should be basically not harvested in. Prunus should only be planted at higher altitudes it occurs in montane forests and some mistakes have been made with with cultivation experiments but by planting at lower altitudes and most of these these initiatives have failed but also we should be believed that exploitation inventory should be carried out prior to harvesting. Reggae monitoring should be carried out and farmers should be trained on good harvesting practices. There's considerable evidence to suggest that a felling rotational system will be much more sustainable for farmers than actually harvesting standing bark. Some final thoughts on prunus africana. A 2013 patent by a series of Indian researchers showed that the active ingredient for prunus africana could be extracted from not only the bark but the leaves and the small twigs. Now this has a huge impact for farmer income. If farmers were to manage cultivated prunus on a rotational basis by felling individual trees and replanting they could actually accrue significant income from single individuals of the species and this is incredibly important. But these farmers need more support. The government of Cameroon Regeneration Fund don't currently for example they should be paying farmers to plant material on farms. Prunus africana doesn't fall into that category. And ICRAF and see for another research organizations are very interested in resurrecting our research on prunus for farmers as long as the market is available for farmers to sell their product and this is incredibly important. We also believe that investigating the potential of the Asian market, the emerging Asian market in particular China and India should be further investigated. But my final plea if you like is to offer ourselves. The research that's been presented here in this presentation is based on many many years of empirical studies and it provides a very robust evidence base and we have no particular advocacy stance on prunus africana. We just believe that the science is showing us that currently it's harvesting in the wild is unsustainable and the future of the market if you like it for the income of the species is in cultivation and farmer support. And I would just like to make that plea to you at the COP to think about those. The evidence is presented here. Think about the wild harvesting versus cultivation and the trade-offs within and I just like to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present from afar and I welcome very much hearing about your deliberations this afternoon. Thank you very much.