Claims of sustainable management of Guyana’s forests made by the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) and the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment are false even for one of the best-known timbers, says John Palmer, a Senior Associate of the Forest Management Trust.
“It is contrary to all national policies for timber logs to be exported instead of processed in Guyana, yet the GFC appears to be happy to allow tens of thousands of cubic metres to leave Guyana each year at sub-normal declared prices even while there are claims of local lumber shortages,” said Palmer in a letter to this newspaper which was published on Sunday.
Concerns have been raised recently about the exports of high volumes of unprocessed logs and Palmer has expressed concern at incomplete forestry data put out by the GFC but noted that Guyana has committed to improvements including transparency of operations and reporting under its MoU with Norway, and has also applied for a voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) with the European Union under the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade action plan. “Integral to a VPA is independent forest monitoring which implies also greater transparency and an end to government censorship of information,” he observed.
Focusing on purpleheart and citing several studies, Palmer said that clearly there has been a rise in selective over-cutting of purpleheart at least from 1996. He noted that there was concern even in 2002 “The question is, however, can Guyana’s forest sustain this level of extraction in the near future.
This practice [the focus on timbers in the special (highest) class for royalty – greenheart, purpleheart, red cedar, brown silverballi, letterwood, bulletwood] can pose a threat to the Guyana’s forest,” he quoted from the GFC’s ‘Forestry in Guyana – Market Report for 2001.’ But no precautionary action was taken, Palmer said.
The selectivity of focus on purpleheart is even more striking in relation to the log exports, Palmer said. He pointed out that purpleheart volume as a percentage of total log and chainsawn production rose from 2 in 1996 to 8 in 2006, the last year for which specific data was published. Purpleheart volume as a percentage of total log export volumes rose from 8 in 1999 to 33 in 2010 and for the period January to September last year, stood at 20%.
Citing several reports, Palmer said that purpleheart is widespread but not common. “It is one of the species which grows in clumps or ‘reefs’, so the ‘average’ tree stocking is actually misleading. Purpleheart reefs contain more trees than the average stocking but then there are wide areas with no purpleheart until the next reef.
Thus purpleheart needs special protection against over-harvesting, provided by a rule to not fell trees within 10 m of each other, according to the GFC Code of Practice for Timber Harvesting (2002). This 10 m rule is based on abundant research on tree gaps by the Tropenbos Guyana Programme,” he wrote.
However, he noted that the GFA Consulting Group scoping study on independent forest monitoring noted in December 2011 that the GFC had relaxed informally this critical distance to 8 m, thus allowing more trees to be cut in a reef. “The GFC cited higher-level ‘policy direction’ although there is no published research to justify this relaxation.
The then junior Minister for Forestry at the time of the GFA study in October 2011 made no public explanation for the ‘policy direction’ to ignore the Tropenbos research,” he noted.
“Given that purpleheart is a commercially desirable timber but a not-common tree, a citizen (and thus a stakeholder in the national forest estate) might reasonably expect conservative management by the GFC,” he said but noted that this has not happened.
