Today’s column marks the end of this ten-part series on Guyana’s forest sector. In previous columns I outlined the results of the failure to put existing forest law and national policies into effect, or to integrate the sector within the larger economy and society. This final column highlights the abuse of our fragile and unique Guiana Shield forests, including the excessive rates of selective cutting of premium timber hardwoods in the areas controlled legally and illegally by the Asian timber companies.
ASI – Accreditation Services International GmbH carried out its annual audit of SGS (the company which first issued, then suspended, a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate of good forest management to the Barama Company), in November 2006. Its report catalogued a number of failures by the certified company to comply with the FSC’s Principles and Criteria, including the lack of a public summary for the management plan for the certified compartment 4 (378,596 ha) (www.accreditation-services. com/ Documents/ ASI-Forest%20 Manage-ment%20Audit-Guyana-SGS-2006-Final.pdf). Incidentally, the Timber Sales Agreement 04/91, the compartment boundary and logging block and harvest area maps, the forest management and other operational plans for Barama are not in the public domain. The Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) arrangement negotiated by cabinet in February 1991 is only in the public domain because it was leaked in the mid-1990s and extracts have been published by Marcus Colchester of the World Rainforest Movement in 1997.
In addition, the Barama Company’s own documentation issued for the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of its parent Company SamLing Global Limited on the Hong Kong stock exchange shows that the company is cutting larger areas per year (about 50 per cent more) than is compatible with the length of the felling cycle, that is, the time is takes for forest re-growth before a logger can come back to cut commercial-sized trees again in the same spot. Barama is not following the precautions concerning felling cycles for individual species mentioned on page 8 in the GFC Code of Practice for Timber Harvesting (2nd edition, November 2002). The harvesting practices of the JaLing company also violate these mandatory guidelines of the GFC.
Let us first consider extraction rates. SGS Qualifor quoted in February 2006 average extraction rates of 8-11 m3/ha by the Barama Company. What is certain is that the Barama Company can only claim to be maintaining an extraction rate that is far below the allowable harvest of 20 m3/ha for a 40-year felling cycle if all timber species are lumped together. However, the Code of Practice requires precaution against over-cutting of individual species, and this precaution is not being followed. In other words, Barama is ‘creaming’ the forest rapidly for a small number of high-value timbers, most of which are being exported as unprocessed logs to Asia, contravening both national policies in Guyana and the intentions of Barama’s foreign direct investment (FDI) arrangements. These contraventions have been mentioned publicly by the Minister for Forestry in his press conference on December 8, 2006 (http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article_general_news?id=56509485).
The Barama Company’s TSA 04/1991 has a gross area of 1.61 million ha, of which the net operable area is said to be 1.05 million ha. The Barama Company determined that there were only 172,000 ha operable out of 582,000 ha in compartments 1-3 located in the Port Kaituma area. Barama cut over that 30 per cent of its TSA during 1993-2001. In other words, the company cut 22,000 ha per year in an 8-year period. GFC’s standard felling cycle is 60 years so Barama should not have been cutting more than 17,500 ha per year. Barama has argued that its plywood timbers such as baromalli grow faster and therefore it should be allowed a 40-year felling cycle. That would mean 26,200 ha per year, which corresponds to its rate for compartments 1-3 when the Edinburgh Centre for Tropical Forestry (ECTF) was monitoring on site.
Now consider the cutting rates in Barama’s other compartments after ECTF and DFID technical foresters had departed:
Compartments 4-5: gross area 589,000 ha, net operable area 497,000 ha or 84 per cent of the gross area (apparently better or easier forest), scheduled for 2004-2017. The company projects to cut over these two compartments in 14 years which equals cutting over 36,000 ha per year, which is twice as fast as the GFC’s 60-year cycle (17,500 ha per year) and almost 40 per cent faster than a possibly negotiable 40-year cycle (26,200 ha per year).
Compartments 6-7: gross area 440,000 ha, net operable area 379,000 ha or 86 per cent, scheduled for 2018-2027. The company projects to cut over these two compartments in 10 years which equals cutting over 38,000 ha per year. This projected rate of extraction is similar to compartments 4 and 5. It is 45 per cent too fast even for a 40-year felling cycle.
The Asian logging companies, including the Barama Company, are highly selective in the timbers they are logging. As this column and many letter writers over the past year have shown, they are extracting and shipping out the prime hardwood timbers, primarily greenheart and purpleheart, and at declared prices which are far below international CIF prices for technically comparable timbers from other tropical countries. As last week’s column mentioned, the Barama Company supplies about half of the timber needs of its downstream timber processing businesses in China; high-value office flooring – which we should be able to produce in Guyana. Meanwhile, Barama has downsized its own plywood business while other timber value added businesses are severely hampered by the scarcity of the same timbers that are exported legally and illegally (‘baptised’ under other names).
If this is bad, then page 8 of the Letter from the Board of the Seapower Company documents a worse disregard for the GFC’s Code of Practice. JaLing grants its W & J Forest Resources Development Limited (owned 50 per cent by JaLing and 50 per cent by Chu Wenze for Danny Chan) the right to harvest 200,000 m3 per year. Reckoning on the GFC harvest limit of 20 m3 per ha, and an overall harvestable volume of 2.8 million m3, this means a net operable area of 140,000 ha and a harvest cycle of 14 years (15 years in the Letter), followed by 25 years of fallow. This is not sustainable forest management in the sense of GFC’s Code of Practice on Timber Harvesting. These amount to piratical cut-and-clear-out single-cut operations in forest areas controlled legally and illegally by JaLing. Given current intensities of logging, it is likely that the Chinese contractor Wuchang will extract much less than 20 m3 per ha, so it will cut over more hectares per year to achieve its 200,000 m3 target, and so rip through in even less than 15 years.
Guyanese might well ask: who was the bright spark proposing this pillage? One of the suspects is an ex-Barama manager, also active in the preparation of similar management plans for Karlam and Timber World and a host of other carpet-bagging Asian timber companies. This ex-Barama manager is also a shareholder in some of the companies, and he acts as a go-between these companies and the state regulatory agency. The question is: who is monitoring Guyana’s interests, including the pillaged forests, as required by Article 36 of the National Constitution? – “In the interests of the present and future generations, the State will protect and make rational use of its land, mineral and water resources
