Commerce Minister Manniram Prashad appears to be going a different route to the Prime Minister in seeking to bring the scourge of metal theft that is inextricably tied to the scrap industry under control.
In 2006, under pressure from the major utility companies, the primary targets for metal thieves, the Prime Minister had imposed a menu of sanctions, restrictions on the issuance of operating licences, temporary scrap export bans and pre-shipping cargo inspections involving representatives of the companies that had been suffering losses.
Part of the reason why these measures have only had limited success is because they failed to take account of the thriving illegal overland trade in scrap which effectively circumvented the measures put in place by the Prime Minister.
What the measures did, however, was to threaten the legitimate trade, a circumstance that led to the hurried creation of the Guyana Scrap Metal Dealers Association (GSMDA). The purpose of the Association was, first, to lend a semblance of legitimacy to an industry that is woefully unregulated and in which there are many more illegal operators than legal ones and, secondly, to create a negotiating structure that could talk with government about the problems within the trade.
The truth is, of course, that such assurances as the GSMDA may have sought to provide regarding its commitment to helping to regulate and “clean up” the scrap trade could hardly be relied upon since its membership embraced only a small minority of the country’s scrap dealers. Moreover, it is no secret that the lines between legality and illegality in the trade are decidedly blurred since there are cases in which metal thieves find markets for their booty among licensed exporters.
As the global demand for metals has created an expansion in the local trade metal theft has become an increasingly difficult problem to cope with. Cross-border trade now appears out of control and the GSMDA has been able to do very little to persuade dealers to adhere to the Code of Conduct articulated as part of its constitution. There are reports too, that the real “movers and shakers” behind the overland scrap exports are non-Guyanese – reportedly mostly Brazilians and Asians – who are well-connected to the wider international market.
Part of the commitment that emerged from the discourses between the scrap dealers and the Prime Minister was that efforts would be made to police the trade and to try to at least reduce the flow of the illegal cross-border trade. This initiative failed because monitoring the movement of scrap overland is not on the front burner of either the Guyana Police Force or CANU and there is no alternative mechanism to perform that monitoring job.
Enter Minister Manniram Prashad who says that he will work with the GSMDA and with a specially selected Task Force to monitor the industry. Whether the Minister’s monitoring mechanism will work will depend, critically, on its capacity to reduce the illegal overland trade which represents a huge part of the market for stolen metals. In other words, it really makes no sense in imposing monitoring and regulatory mechanisms for the legal scrap dealers whose adherence to rules can be monitored with relative ease while ignoring the various illegal operators across the country whose illegal network continues to drive the trade.
Talk of legislation designed to regulate the industry has arisen from time to time but in the final analysis laws that regulate the scrap industry cannot be effectively implemented without adequate enforcement capacity and given the prevailing dearth of resources to create that capacity one doubts that the problem of metal theft will disappear purely on the basis of talk of a Task Force.
