A United Kingdom buyer earlier this week shipped out a quantity of sawn greenheart lumber to the UK and the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) hailed the sale saying that it demonstrated government’s efforts to promote value-added processing in the country.
The government has been criticised for allowing large-scale exports of logs, particularly to China and India, without value-added processing being done here despite commitments by companies from those countries to do so. In particular, the Chinese logging company Bai Shan Lin and the Indian logging company Vaitarna Private Holdings Inc have come under scrutiny for their large-scale shipments of logs.
In a statement on Thursday, the GFC said government has been emphasising the multiple benefits that arise to all stakeholders through the conversion of logs into sawn lumber and other value- added forest products. Over the past decade, it said, government has worked collaboratively with private sector groups such as the Forest Products Association (FPA), the Guyana Manufacturers and Services Association (GMSA), and the Com-munity Forestry Associa-tions (CFA’s), to implement several initiatives that have led to a better enabling environment for the manufacture of in-country added value forest products. This process continues to move forward aggressively and is resulting in a marked increase in added value forest products, according to the GFC.
“A very good example is demonstrated through a consolidated shipment of sawn Greenheart lumber that is currently being loaded in a chartered vessel; the purchaser is Aitken and Howard Company which has been buying sawn Greenheart lumber in Guyana for over 30 years,” the GFC said. According to the statement, company official Roderick Aitken has advised that the greenheart is for typically large engineering projects through the UK and Europe, ranging from bridge construction, marine defence projects and oil industry projects.
“He further indicated that through partnering with their principal suppliers within Guyana; they have been able to consolidate a shipment of almost 2700m3 of sawn lumber to take to the European markets,” the statement said. It added that Aitken and Howard’s stated buying policy is for suppliers to do as much downstream processing in country as possible. This enables the local suppliers to get a better profit, as well as generate more in country employment.
According to the GFC, Aitken praised Guyana’s Wood Tracking System (WTS), which is national in scale and emphasised that it was largely due to the WTS that they were able to import these timbers into the European market. “The WTS gives us and our customers a very high degree of confidence that the lumber is all traceable and the logs have been felled in accordance with the GFC code of practice. It cannot be underestimated how important these traceability schemes are to the end customer and are a part of the requirements to export to Europe,” the statement quoted him as saying.
“These statements and the fact that Guyanese timbers continue to have access to demanding overseas markets clearly show that the forest sector in Guyana continues to make positive progress,” the GFC asserted.
