Dilemma
Last week’s column revealed what is perhaps a crucial dilemma facing Guyana’s forests. During the past decade, the extractive forest sub-sector’s value-added contribution to its GDP growth has yielded poor returns, weak and erratic performances, along with a distinctively declining trend. Furthermore, this outcome has been underscored by an exceptionally low recorded historical deforestation rate. Indeed, the rate is considered so low, it is now widely recognized that, from the 20th century to date, this has been perhaps, one of the world’s lowest rates of deforestation, if not the lowest.
Idealist
Naïve, and simple cultural/social behavioural explanations of this dilemma are based on an idealist interpretation of the forest-dependent peoples’ deep cultural attachment to preserving the forest environment as intact and as virgin as possible. This behaviour is frequently romanticized as the quintessential expression of the forest peoples living in harmony with nature (that is the given virgin forest ecosystems they have inherited) and not seeking, in any form or manner, to exploit or degrade the forest ecosystems for immediate, short and medium-term benefit or gain.
While, there is no doubt that some elements of such contentions are relevant as explanations of this historical outcome, I propose a different interpretation here. For me, the decisive consideration which lies behind this outcome, is that the centuries-old prevailing varieties of ‘pre-capitalist’ forms of economic production and social organization that have prevailed historically in Guyana’s forests, did not have the capability of generating greater returns from the forests. The low rates of deforestation, forest degradation, and the associated environmental deterioration which have occurred, have been primarily a consequence of this lack of capability among the prevailing forest production and social structures and processes operating at the time to do otherwise.
The question therefore arises ‒ which I address in the next section ‒ what, in brief, were these prevailing ‘pre- capitalist’ forms? My response to this question will occupy the remainder of today’s column.
Pre-capitalist forms
Readers would have already gathered from the above comments, as well as others I have offered in previous columns that I am heavily influenced by the notion of modes of production, as a fundamental determinant or causal consideration behind deeply-rooted historical occurrences. As a result, therefore, I remain very sceptical of episodic, conjunctural, or contingent explanations of such phenomena. I feel Guyana’s centuries-old low deforestation rate is best explained by such notions and their inferred considerations.
Based on a rich number of academic studies, reports, analytical reviews, and historical documents on Guyana’s extractive forest sub-sector, the compelling picture that emerges is one in which, before the full integration of this sub-sector into Guyana’s dominant colonial mode of production, (which was still relatively intact up to the time of its Independence, half-a-century ago), a striking feature of the forest system was that forms of petty or simple commodity production dominated the provision of livelihoods for forest dependent Guyanese.
In this formulation, the producer(s) of forest products, whether as individuals or in groups, owned and controlled the production means (typically primitive equipment, tools, land, and structures) that were engaged in producing forest products. There was, as a rule, no strong waged class of workers. Instead family (wives, children, and other forms of lineage) provided most of the required labour. The forest products, which were thereby obtained, were consumed by the producers or sold and bartered through rudimentary, irregular, ad-hoc, and at times, illicit markets. These markets were found in both other accessible hinterland and urban centres, as well as in selective areas further afield, especially in relatively large, regionally located urban centres, and even the capital city Georgetown.
Such forest-related operations were decidedly small-scale, and, as a consequence, they generated minimal surplus or profit. Such low net returns restricted the capacity of these operations to generate adequate resources for their extended accumulation.
Further, along with this low capitalisation, limited equipment, restricted land access and operational structures prevailed. The techniques applied in the production and distribution processes were rudimentary, and so too were the skills required by the labour used in these operations. In general, therefore, readers may conclude that as a generic description, what we have here is what one would typically find universally in pre-capitalist structures and processes.
Exchange
However, in such formations, where exchanges did take place (whether by sale or barter), these were largely based on customary and traditional practices, including those sanctioned by the then colonial authorities. The roles of institutionalized commercial credit, risk, loans, debt, and securitization of assets (including stocks) were extremely restricted to non-existent.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, such petty/simple production systems were quite vulnerable to dependent insertion into relatively more developed capitalistic market forms of production and circulation as a result of trade and exchange.
And indeed the record shows that these operations did not escape the grasp of traders, illegal operatives, and other entrepreneurs with links to urban centres, and even the capital city, Georgetown.
Because Guyana’s dominant forest population was made up of its First Peoples, much of this type of petty or simple commodity production morphed into their traditional and customary subsistence structures and settled communities. And as a result of this circumstance, there emanated a strong communalist flavour to these operations.
Next week’s column will provide a wrap-up to this discussion.