Dear Editor
Before the Government and the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) become too excited about recent nominal fines on serially-offending logging concession holders, may I suggest a review of some facts:
The GFC has had an obligation since its 1993 concessions policy to audit loggers at not more than two-year intervals.
In relation to the conversion of some short-term (two-year) State Forest Permissions which greatly exceeded the upper size limit of 8,000 ha (20,000 acres) into long-term concessions (TSAs), GFC reports from 2001 have recommended an increase in field monitoring while the conversion assessments were in progress.
Instead, the Commissioner of Forests informed the public by way of newspaper advertisements (SN, 27 March 2006) that he was reducing monitoring at the Linden Forest Station from 1 April 2006.
Holders of large-scale / long-term concessions owed more than US $1.4 million in 2001 to the GFC and were neither penalized nor charged interest on these debts (‘The Forestry Sector in Guyana’ by Lachlan Hunter. Guyana Forestry Commission, 2001; ‘Study on forest sector financing in Guyana’ by Jyrki Salmi and Kelvin Craig. UNDP and GFC, 2001).
Improperly declared exports of fine timber logs to Asia were probably earning US$3-5 million per month in 2006.
Barama has one legally-awarded concession of 1.61 million hectares, ran its plymill at 25 percent capacity and its sawmills at seven to eight percent capacity in 2005/6, receives tax concessions from the Government of Guyana worth US$800,000 per year to aid in-country milling but exported at least 119,000 cubic metres of fine furniture logs (Samling Global Ltd, Initial Public Offering 2007) worth about US $60 million CIF China in the same period.
Barama has recently been fined US$470,000 for a variety of forest crimes. In terms of national accounting, this is just over half of the annual tax concessions given to Barama. In other words, Barama continues to win, and Guyana to lose.
The GFC is said to have used the “compounding of forest offences” procedure (Section 29 of the Forests Act 1953) but this requires an admission of guilt by the offender, while Barama continues to deny.
The GFC is either technically incapable of marshalling a court case during which forest owners can be exposed through cross-examination, or it is using illegal or undocumented procedures to cut under-the-table deals with them (Stabroek News, Friday, October 26, 2007, The Guyana Forestry Commission should take major offenders to court. http://www.stabroek news.com/index.pl/article?id=56531812).
The President, as Minister of Forestry, has claimed that Guyana’s log harvesting procedures are among the best in the world (‘Guyana ‘s log harvesting procedures among best in the world – Jagdeo – deploying forests does not mean transferring ownership’, Kaieteur News, 17 October 2007).
However, the ITTO’s Status of Tropical Management 2005 Report stated for Guyana that “the national forest policy 1997 is widely accepted as a sound guide for the forest sector but is yet to be fully implemented” (The regulation of our forests may not be as effective as the Commissioner thinks. Stabroek News, Thursday, November 23, 2006. http://www.stabroek-news. com/index.pl/article_letters?id=56508434).
One of GFC’s consultants repeated the point in October 2007 that rules need to be implemented to be effective. This reflects the business opinion reported in SN (Businessmen join Granger-Luncheon security debate). Media blamed for not ‘tracking’ security issues. SN, Friday, November 16, 2007.
http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56533310).
And the President will offer the forests of Guyana for mitigation of climate change at CoP 13 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali (UNFCCC)? With this record of national forest management, who would accept such an offer?
Yours faithfully,
Mahadeo Kowlessar
