One year on, Barama Com-pany Limited (BCL) is yet to receive its re-certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) after being suspended in January 2007 following an audit for failing to maintain the standards in forest management which it had previously reached.
Back in September last year, BCL’s Chairman Girwar Lalaram said that the company was expecting to have an audit done of its operations in a bid to regain certification. The company had hired a consultant to perform a pre-audit exercise to make sure it was in order for the FSC audit.
BCL was awarded FSC certification by South African forest certification body SGS-Qualifor in February 2006 for 570,000 hectares of its forests in west central Guyana. For this, World Wildlife Fund for Nature-Guianas (WWF) had provided financial and technical support to BCL in the process leading up to its successful certification.
Repeated attempts during last week to reach Lalaram, CEO Peter Ho and Forest Planning Manager Neil Chand for a comment on re-certification proved futile.
Concerns had been raised as to the effect BCL’s recent corruption debacle would have had on the re-certification process. The company was made to pay the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) a fine of $96.4M for a number of breaches related to under declaration and the falsifying of documentation with respect to product origin committed in third party concessions.
BCL was found to have removed a quantity of logs from WCL 05/93, issued to N. Sukul, without approval from the GFC. This, the GFC said, was evidence of unauthorized harvesting and extraction of forest produce. The GFC said these findings had been made after a detailed analysis of records had been done, including a comparison of the documentation supplied to the GFC by the companies with the internal records of those companies.
One criterion for certification is the strict adherence to system procedures which include the tagging of logs and chain of custody requirements.
WWF-Guianas staff visited BCL’s forest concession in late February and early March 2007 to observe the company’s on-the-ground response to the suspension of its FSC certificate and corresponding corrective action requests issued by SGS Qualifor in January 2007.
This visit was a follow up to the meeting between BCL, FSC and WWF held in Bonn, Germany in February 2007 to review the findings of the SGS-Qualifor and Accredita-tion Services International (ASI) audits that had led to the suspension, and the actions necessary on the part of BCL to secure the reinstatement of the FSC certificate.
WWF in a press release in April had reiterated its call both to BCL and its parent company Samling, to make a high level commitment to responsible forestry according to the rigorous standards of the FSC.
The WWF visit included a limited survey of compartment 5 of the BCL concession, the Buck Hall sawmill and management centre, main field camp, logging crew camps, as well as three non-BCL concessions where BCL is currently conducting harvesting operations.
The visit revealed that BCL did not practise reduced impact logging on third party concessions. According to WWF, BCL said that the investment required to implement RIL on these concessions was difficult to justify given their lack of long-term tenure, since concession owners could terminate their supply contracts with BCL at any time.
The visit found that there had been a lack of consistent decision-making and exercise of authority by BCL managers who truly understood the details of FSC certification and cutting-edge, modern sustainable forest practices.
WWF said that high staff turnover in management, coupled with (cross-cultural challenges) had inhibited consistent application of BCL policies. This situation had also exacerbated a breakdown in dialogue with many key stakeholders, WWF said.
The visiting team found that while some aspects concerning workers’ living conditions, health and sanitation were being improved, others remained wanting.
Forest researcher Janette Bulkan is concerned that BCL is allowed to operate although it admits that the forest management plan – a legal prerequisite – is still a work in progress more than 16 years after the company has received its Timber Sales Agreement (TSA).
She said: “This illegally favourable treatment of [BCL] contrasts with the Presidential claim reported on January 7, 2008, that Government has a very strict system to effectively monitor what happens in relation to stewardship of the forests.”
She noted in a letter to this newspaper that Commissioner of Forests James Singh had issued an open letter almost a year ago unreservedly praising BCL “just a week before BCL’s certificate of good forest management was suspended by the auditor SGS-Qualifor.”
Bulkan is concerned that the Commissioner of Forests continued to publicly defend BCL as late as July 2007, less than three months before a public announcement of major widespread illegalities in the large-scale forestry concessions. “The GFC has not rescinded its approbation of BCL even though on Presidential direction BCL has since been levied with a nominal fine of US$ 470,000 for a variety of forest crimes,” Bulkan said.
