Dear Editor,
Todd Morgan is so anxious that I should improve the President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) that his letter to the editor of the Guyana Chronicle was printed twice, on Sunday August 9 and Monday August 10 (‘Detractors of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy’). He feels that it is not patriotic to point out some of the weaknesses in the Guyana Forestry Commis-sion’s (GFC) proposal to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Fund or the President’s LCDS. I suggest that, on the contrary, the poor quality work by the GFC and the Office of Climate Change (OCC) in the Office of the President do Guyana no credit in the competition for international funds, and that correcting these weaknesses is or should be an obligation for these well-staffed offices. Stakeholders in civil society might be able to supplement both sketchy documents provided that we can see the factual bases and the reasoning on which these government offerings are based. I have already requested that the bases for the LCDS be placed in the public domain (my letters ‘Wish lists for LCDS’ in KN, August 6, and ‘The LCDS website is not complying with the process document for communications about LCDS’ in SN, August7) and the OCC has so far failed to respond.
In my series of 10 articles on carbon in the forests of Guyana which SN is publishing in feature columns, I am giving due credit to the GFC for laying out a plan to assess the dynamics of forest carbon. I am commenting in these columns on the uncertainty about the estimates, and on the reluctance of the GFC to use its wealth of data accumulated since 1908, as well as on the inconsistencies in the GFC proposals to the World Bank. More stringent comments have been made by the Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) of the Forest Carbon Partnership Fund, and these are on the FCPF website –
http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/fcp/Node/179 – (but nothing mentioned on the GFC’s own website). The World Bank’s country representative in Guyana does not seem to have read the TAP review (‘Guyana in climate change lead role’ in GC, August 9).
The President’s LCDS is a brief spending plan, lacking in usable detail, for an assumed income corresponding to an annual 10 per cent annuity of about US$ 580 million, on a capital sum estimated from the deliberate deforestation of 90 per cent of the natural tropical forest after destructive logging and mining at an average rate of 4 per cent per year (630,000 ha/year) for 25 years. The deforestation would then be followed by commercial plantations. The McKinsey report used unpublished data to suggest that the hinterland of Guyana contains 2.2 million hectares (Mha) of Class 1 agricultural soils and 0.8 Mha of Class 2 hilly soils (of which 0.5 Mha are in the Rupununi and so presumably subject to Amerindian land claims).
These 3.0 Mha would be used for “rice, fruit production, and other agricultural efforts,” according to McKinsey. The other 12.1 Mha of land to be deliberately deforested would be used for “oil palm, softwood pulp or hardwood tree plantations.” No supporting evidence was provided to show that such schemes would be biologically feasible or financially profitable; there are no extant trials on these soils of modern agricultural varieties or forest plantation species, and the National Agricultural Research Institute has been conspicuously silent on the LCDS.
Both the President and the Minister of Agriculture have claimed repeatedly, and most recently in the address to the PPP members of the National Assembly (‘LCDS: an example of Guyana pursuing solutions,’ GC, August 9), that “there is considerable demand for the unallocated State forests by both local and foreign investors,” but the government has not responded to my request for publication of details; so much for the government’s respect for Article 13 in the Guyana Constitu-tion.
The negotiations between the Roraima rice farmer Quarteiro and the government for a 50-year lease for commercial agriculture in the Rupununi have not been placed in the public domain (‘Guyanese President wants to support Brazilian’s project’ by Elissan Paula Rodrigues. Folha de Boa Vista, July 30, 2009; ‘“Land concession good for 50 years, says Marcio Junqueira,”’ Folha de Boa Vista, July 30, 2009; and ‘Quartiero comes to an agreement with Guyana’ by Ribamar Rocha, Folha de Boa Vista, August 4, 2009). There has been no explanation of the interest in the unallocated State Forest not already declared by the GFC as inoperable, reserved for biodiversity and habitat conservation or subject to Amerindian claims. The remaining area is some 2.8 Mha (GFC 2008 data), very different from the 15.1 Mha which the LCDS proposes for deforestation. Exactly why there is the claimed interest is not explained, but Guyana being ‘a soft touch’ for foreign direct investors, with no insistence on fulfilment of vaguely worded investment plans, acceptance of shady accounting and easy export of income, a low level of government supervision and easy evasion of laws and regulations, makes this country a target for crooks.
So as currently presented, the LCDS scenario looks very weak. The idea that foreign donors would be prepared to pay the Office of the President around US$580 million per year not to sponsor this deforestation is just fantastical. Why does not Guyana use its membership of the 40-countries Coalition for Rainforest Nations to work up proposals which are more in the mainstream? Why also has the OCC put on the LCDS website the first version of The Little REDD Book (which summarises the variety of mainstream proposals) instead of the expanded second edition? That second edition was circulated at the Bonn meeting in June this year, at which a member of the OCC was present. The second edition can be downloaded from – http://www.globalcanopy.org/themedia/file/PDFs/LRB_lowres/lrb_en.pdf
Why also is the OCC not supporting the Amerindians who have sovereignty over the above-ground carbon in the forests on titled Amerindian Village Lands to develop their own projects for trading carbon and other global environmental benefits, as governments in Brazil and Indonesia are supporting their indigenous peoples?
In summary, before calling on civil society to do the OCC’s work, the OCC needs to rationalize the LCDS and place in the public domain the factual bases for the calculation of the Economic Valuation to the Nation. After that, we can begin to question the McKinsey and presidential contentions that there are no trading markets at present for forest-based environmental services (wrong, there is a trading market for biodiversity) or for carbon (wrong, tropical forest-based carbon has been traded since 1993 on the voluntary market), and question why McKinsey used its own off-beat valuation system instead of the mainstream valuation methods of which the GFC at least will be aware; such as the FAO Forestry Paper number 127, 1995 “Valuing forests: context, issues and guidelines.”
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan