Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter signed by Peter Persaud in Stabroek News (‘The LCDS is not cast in stone and there will be ongoing consultations with Amerindian communities,’ April 2), and respond here to the six points –
1. The hinterland consultations on the President’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) were guided by nine best-practice principles for consultation prepared by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED, based in Edinburgh, UK).
Unfortunately the President’s Office of Climate Change and its ministerial field teams failed to follow those principles, as the IIED report notes in its many comments on the limitations of the process. Notes by the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) on the hurried nature of the presentations (relative to Amerindian traditions), the lack of timely delivery of the LCDS draft document, the lack of a version suitable for hinterland communities, the failure to translate into Amerindian languages or to prepare video substitutes, and the failures to respond to hundreds of questions are also reflected in the IIED report. This report noted the sketchy nature of the LCDS propositions and the lack of supporting analysis and documentation. If Mr Persaud and his colleagues would read beyond page 13 in this 129-page report they would find that the APA notes and IIED may differ in expression but not significantly in substance.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP 2007) is a non-justiciable declaration which has no force in national law. Mr Persaud and his colleagues are not correct in saying that it is “widely assumed that a universal convention on the rights of indigenous peoples will be developed by the UN based upon the declaration.” On the contrary, drafts have been debated inconclusively in international fora for many years and UNDRIP represents the achievable consensus. Even so, some countries with substantial indigenous populations have refused to sign, including Canada, New Zealand and the USA, while others have abstained. In contrast, the rights of the Amerindians would be appreciably strengthened by Guyana’s ratification of the justiciable ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989). Presumably Mr Persaud as a personage in The Amerindian Action Movement of Guyana (TAAMOG) would support such ratification?
2. The LCDS draft of June 2009 and the powerpoint document used in the hinterland consultations were not framed in language suitable for hinterland communities, as both the APA and IIED point out. After that round of short presentations in June-July 2009, there has been no systematic work by the President’s Office of Climate Change (OCC) to respond to the hundreds of so-far unanswered questions, during the following nine months. The OCC had funds for just one presentation at 13 reported hinterland locations, but apparently no funds to follow up. If the LCDS is now claimed to be a central feature of government development planning, there seems to have been an error in budgeting.
Most importantly, the OCC has been unable to explain what “opting into the LCDS” means in terms of livelihoods for the hinterland communities, in agriculture, logging and mining. It is logically impossible for the government to claim that the LCDS consultation process has adhered to the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent while the OCC is unable to provide a clear and unambiguous explanation of what “opting in” actually means for livelihoods; the information on which to base consent, delay or rejection is simply absent. The OCC teams gave inconsistent responses to questions on this point during the hinterland, urban and mining meetings and at the Multi-Stakeholder Steering Committee meetings, ranging from “no effect on traditional rotational subsistence agriculture” to “miners and loggers will have to comply with regulations if external monitors require it.”
What these regulations might prescribe was and remains unclear from the OCC records of the consultations, and apparently to government itself. The President’s special committee on land use, possibly replacing the long-standing Natural Resources and Environment Advisory Committee to the Cabinet, seems to be unaware of the existing legislation and regulations for mining and logging, and of the commitment in the National Development Strategy to integrated land use planning, as piloted in Region 10 in 1997.
Mr Persaud and his colleagues have not done their arithmetic on the LCDS. The President’s draft LCDS refers to 15 million hectares (15Mha) of forest but the State Forest under the administration of the Guyana Forestry Commission covers 13.8 Mha. Where are the other 1.3 Mha which the President also proposes to deforest in his economically rational plan as conceived for him by McKinsey & Co in 2008? Or not to deforest if the donor countries will give him USD 580 million per year – but somehow logging (and associated forest degradation) and mining (and associated deforestation) will continue unchecked or even expanded? Yet the President says that LCDS and Reduced Emissions (of forest carbon) from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) are compatible. The OCC has not explained the paradox of the LCDS and REDD documents containing no specific commitments to reductions in emissions, while the President repeatedly claims compatibility withthe international understanding of REDD as verifiable reductions inemissions.
(See also the comments on area anomalies by Professor CY Thomas in his column, Guyana and the Wider World, ‘Compounding errors of measurement: an LCDS concern’ (SN, March 14)).
3. The court case brought by the Amerindian communities of the Upper Mazaruni concerns their petition for the boundaries of the titled village lands to be concurrent. In this way, the villages would not have a problem of non-Amerindians inserting themselves between the village lands and causing environmental problems through poorly controlled mining. The court case long predates the enactment of the Amerindian Act 2006, so it is unclear why Mr Persaud and his colleagues now suggest engagement with the government. Does the executive intend to stimulate the court to deal conclusively with this case?
Mr Persaud and his colleagues are entirely incorrect in saying that I was silent on the land issues of the indigenous peoples of Suriname, during the review by the technical advisory panel (TAP) of the REDD Readiness Preparation Proposal from Suriname to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF). The leader of that panel has a full record of the e-mail correspondence and the oral discussions, in which such issues were extensively debated and which appear in the TAP review document held by the FCPF Facility Management Team. Mr Persaud and his colleagues can consult the TAP review presentation (document 6c to meeting PC4 of the FCPF, a meeting at which Mr Persaud figures on the participants’ list). The presentation by TAP leader Steve Cobb and Suriname representative Max Ooft is at URL = http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/fcp/sites/forestcarbonpartnership.org/files/Documents/PDF/Oct2009/6.b_Suriname_TAP_Review.pdf.
As pointed out in the press, it is the task of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Takuba Lodge to comment on national boundaries, not for a person engaged in a TAP as a World Bank staff member. The World Bank has inserted into its FCPF web pages a disclaimer about maps and boundaries.
4. Neither the first nor the second draft of the LCDS provides or refers to the basic data sources on which McKinsey & Co constructed its fantastical deforestation scenario – 630,000 ha per year for 25 years, to eliminate 90 per cent of Guyana’s forest, as an economically rational programme. McKinsey & Co could only locate 2.2 Mha of class 1 undulating land on which it proposed the planting of rice after deforestation, and 0.8 Mha of hilly soil on which it proposed to plant oil palm after deforestation. I do not recall seeing Guyanese rice famers planting on undulating land, nor anyone asking for such land with a view to rice planting. Perhaps McKinsey was confused by the reports of the rice farmers in Brazil who were expelled from illegal cultivation on indigenous lands in Roraima then negotiating with the Government of Guyana for land leases in the southern Rupununi? Note that the National Agricultural Research Institute has offered no public domain comment on the McKinsey proposals. The LCDS does not explain why a further 14 Mha would be destructively logged and mined and cleared if there would be no planned and sustainable further use.
Setting aside this ludicrous scheme, and the associated estimate of an annual annuity of US$580 million not to carry out such destruction, we are left with just seven pages (25-31) in the revised LCDS draft of December 2009 to explain how the President would spend US$1 billion on “essential capital projects that can be fully or partially funded through private investment assisted by an in-country infrastructure investment fund built from forest payments.” This giant sum of money is backed only by an undated document from the Office of the President
‘Stimulating growth in the business processing outsourcing sector’ (footnote 34 on page 26), a document which I have been unable to locate on the webpages of GINA, Go-Invest or the Office of the President. So it is not “a matter of opinion” that the list of development projects is not backed by baseline studies. It is a matter of observable fact that the OCC has not backed the LCDS with reference to such baseline studies in the public domain.
5. Article 13 in the national constitution says that “The principal objective of the political system of the State is to establish an inclusionary democracy by providing increasing opportunities for the participation of citizens, and their organizations in the management and decision-making processes of the State, with particular emphasis on those areas of decision-making that directly affect their well-being.” I do not understand this article to mean that citizens have to trot along to the OCC (or the GFC or GGMC) to humbly ask for documents which the government has failed to make available in the public domain as a matter of good governance.
6. Mr Persaud and his colleagues can check the OCC reports of the LCDS hinterland consultations, the urban awareness sessions, and the miners’ meetings for the hundreds of questions raised for which the OCC failed to provide answers. To quote from a previous letter on the subject of unanswered questions – “Just taking the Annai meeting on June 19 as an example, at which Mr Persaud was present, and excluding the pro-forma ‘Support was expressed for the LCDS / Support for the LCDS was noted,’ there were 18 points or questions raised by participants and answered by the President’s team. There were a further 68 points which were raised but for which the formal record indicates no response. Some of these latter points were duplicates – the same point raised by different participants – but still the number of unanswered points is quite different from the assertion of Mr Persaud, that ‘all of the questions, concerns, suggestions and recommendations raised were adequately answered and responded to in very simple language.’” (‘We should look again at the National Development Strategy and develop an action plan taking into account our improved understanding of climate change’ SN, August 17, 2009).
As to why the APA elected not to participate in the LCDS Multi-Stakeholder Steering Committee (MSSC), the answer is surely obvious. It is entirely against best practice for the primary advocate of a proposal to chair a multi-stakeholder process on that proposal. Mr Persaud and his colleagues should read again what the IIED protocol has to say about independent facilitation; that protocol is still on the LCDS website. That protocol also shows awareness of the need to respect the particularities of decision-making in Amerindian communities, so criticising APA members for providing a commentary after some months is not in accord with that protocol, which presumably Mr Persaud knows well as he is a member of that MSSC.
In summary, the OCC is missing a great opportunity in not reviving the National Development Strategy and using the non-partisan neutral forum style of multi-stakeholder process for genuine debate. Almost all the major questions about the LCDS raised from the time of its launch remain unanswered by the OCC. The MSSC as currently constituted and chaired is clearly not the place to look for clarification.
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan