Dear Editor,
During the last week, the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) in two full-page paid advertisements in Kaieteur News on (August 13; August 15) has defended the massive over-cutting by and for the Chinese transnational logger Bai Shan Lin. The GFC argues that the average maximum harvest allowed across Guyana as a whole is 20 m3 per hectare once every 60 years. Most Timber Sales Agreements have a 25-year duration so their limit is 8.3 m3/ha per harvest, for all kinds of timber taken together. That is about 4 trees/ha.
Think of the forest as your garden. Initially you have a few banana or plantain suckers, bora, boulanger, cherry, dunks, gooseberry, okro, saime, sapodilla, shallots and tomatoes – lots of vegetables and fruits. But you are lazy or greedy, so you take all the bora and tomatoes and shallots without replanting them. After that you harvest all the boulanger and okro also without replanting. You still have a garden but it is less productive and your food is much less nutritious and varied.
This is what the GFC is allowing in State Forests. All the best greenheart and purpleheart timbers are harvested, then the silverballi and tonka and tatabu. Then all the wamara. Even the cutting of bulletwood – a legally protected ecologically-keystone species – is readily allowed by the GFC.
In the last ten years, as China and India have become wealthy, their furniture and flooring factories have installed new machinery. Asian markets prefer hard, heavy, dark-coloured and multi-coloured woods. Flooring needs timbers which resist the impact of steel-tipped high heels. The new or re-equipped factories easily and efficiently process our technically superb timbers for their own domestic and export markets, into high-value floors and decorative furniture. So the GFC seems happy to see the slow-growing tatabu and wamara and washiba timber, along with 30 or more other species, to join the exports as raw logs in huge quantities; as shown in the overflight photographs published by Kaieteur News and other photos in Stabroek News.
What is critical for the health and productivity of our forests is the rate of harvest of each species. Our garden (forest) becomes poorer and poorer because the rate of cutting per species far exceeds the rate of natural regeneration of those timbers. In other words, the GFC is misleading civil society by referencing the 8.3 m3/ha as a safe limit. The need for harvest control by species was explicit in the 2002 second edition of the GFC Code of Practice for Timber Harvesting, section 2.3 – ‘sustained yields can only be ensured if a minimum stocking is retained after logging for each individual desirable species. GFC recently developed growth and yield models that can assist in determining the number of trees that can be felled per ha as well as the minimum size (diameter) for each individual species.’
Yield control by species is still recognised although more feebly in the recently published Code of Practice for Forest Operations for TSA/WCL Agreements (section 2.3.6, 2014; see http://www.forestry.gov.gy/Downloads/Code_of_Practice_for_TSA-WCL-2014.pdf) – ‘The choice of 20 m3 per hectare is a deliberate attempt to ensure that merchantable trees remain in the stand after harvesting operations, and that the rate of harvesting does not exceed the growth rate of commercial species.’
If the GFC is so sure of the sustainability of current harvests by and for Chinese transnational Bai Shan Lin and Indian transnational VHPI, will it now publish immediately in a full-page advertisement in every daily newspaper and on its website and in posters in every GFC field station to show how the current rates of harvest for each species in State Forest Authorisation (logging concession) does not exceed the rate of natural regeneration?
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan
