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.
Although I identified this dilemma in the last column, no effort was made to interrogate it there. Deliberately, no explanation was offered for what might have been the long-term causal factor(s) behind this outcome, as distinct from the proximate or immediate operational/situational circumstances, which lie behind it. The traditional view, which is supported by a wide range of local and international analysis on Guyana’s forest is that this outcome has been due principally to the forest-dependent inhabitants’ unique reaction to the