Dear Editor,
The Environment Agency in the UK is subject to central government procurement rules. For several years, the rules have required timber used on government-funded projects to come from legal sources and from forests managed for sustainable production. These are not new rules. The Forest Products Association, the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association, the Guyana Forestry Commission and the two Ministers meeting on October 3 must have been aware of these rules long ago (‘Gov’t, private sector seeking to lift restriction on greenheart exports to UK’ SN, October 4).
Greenheart timber, very durable and resistant to some wood-boring crustaceans, has been preferred for marine construction and dock work in Europe since the 1770s. One of the purposes for the creation of the Forest Department in British Guiana in 1925 was the variable quality and unreliability of delivery of exported greenheart piles and baulks. Ninety years later, Guyana is still a pariah source? In May 2015 Guyana was reminded to provide from forest being managed sustainably, and again in December 2015. Yet there have been no changes in policy and no evidence of the non-selective implementation of policy to demonstrate that Guyana is other than a pariah.
Greenheart is still an abundant timber, almost one in five of the trees of the commercial timber species in the Central Wet forests (centred on Bartica-Cuyuni) are greenheart. However a high proportion of the greenheart trees left standing are the old hollow trees. Techniques for reliable regeneration of greenheart have been known since the 1930s, techniques for reduced-impact mechanized logging since the 1990s.
In Neil Bird’s review of rotation (generation) times in 2000, he pointed out 25-year felling cycles in the Timber Sales Agreements did not allow time for slow-growing greenheart trees to recover and form the next crop when the generation time is an average of 120 years and companies can fell trees down to a diameter of 34 cm. Even a generation (rotation) time of 60 years only allows time for a greenheart tree to put on 14-18 cm of diameter growth.
Repeated short-term re-entry into logging blocks, combined with a market preference for greenheart trees of 30-55 cm diameter, has been stripping the forest faster than it can recover. Greenheart log sizes shown to me by GFC senior staff in June this year were only just above the legal minimum. Trees not felled are being damaged by careless logging (broken branches, allowing pipe rot to enter) as shown by Winrock International in 2011-2. The GFC has failed to implement the section of the Forests Act 2009 which would make compulsory the use of reduced-impact logging. Instead, former Minister Robert Persaud illegally issued a policy directive to the GFC which reduced the minimum distance between tree stumps, so allowing more greenheart trees to be taken from a ‘reef’ and greater damage to the regeneration clustered beneath mother trees; this was illegal because the GFC Act 2007 allows the Minister to give only general policy directives, not specific managerial instructions, and such policy directives must be published in the Official Gazette. That was not done.
Tropenbos concluded in 2002 that repeated logging of greenheart in the Bartica Triangle resulted in low long-term sustainability: “Short-term recovery of greenheart is not to be expected due to low population growth and small numbers of seed trees”. The GFC appears to have ignored entirely the wealth of research data from the nearly two decades of research on greenheart by the University of Utrecht and the Tropenbos Guyana programme. The ban by the Environment Agency in the UK on greenheart for government projects is thus entirely correct. It is up to the exporter/importer to show that the management of the source concession and the logging blocks from which the greenheart logs were derived is sustainable; generalized claims for the whole country are not acceptable. A sustainability test is not about the number of trees standing in the forests of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan
