Barama Company Limited (BCL) yesterday announced that it is not seeking a renewal of its 25-year concession with the Guyana Government, meaning that dozens more of forestry jobs will be lost.
In an advertisement appearing on page 17 of today’s edition, Barama said it will however continue its other projects here inclusive of veneering, plywood manufacturing and sawmilling.
“Barama very much regrets having to take the decision to close our forest concession operations after having, over the past 25 years, invested approximately $45B in the development of Guyana’s forest industry”, the advertisement said.
BCL’s announcement comes after weeks of mixed signals about whether the deal would be extended and the government appeared to have no inkling of it.
Barama was established here in 1991 in a controversial deal which gave South Korean and Malaysian investors control of a lowland, mixed tropical forest concession of approximately 1.6 million hectares in the Northwest region of Guyana.
It had had a chequered history with the authorities, facing fines and questions about limited value added activities in recent years.
At its height, it employed over a thousand workers but numbers have fallen significantly.
The company had reported last month that 180 workers had been retrenched over a three-month period and its General Manager Mohindra Chand had said Barama was forced to let the workers go because of the market slowdown and the fact that government was not moving quickly towards renewing the company’s contract.
The Ministry of Natural Resources has said that in 2015, at the request of Barama for a continuation of its contract, Cabinet gave its ‘no objection’ to the continuing of the arrangement but recommended the convening of a Task Force to examine the request. This Task Force was seen as necessary given the “rapacious activities” of some foreign companies operating in the forests of Guyana, and “some not so positive observations that had been expressed about Barama in particular,” the ministry had said in a statement.
The Task Force comprises representatives of the ministries of Business, Natural Resources, Public Infrastructure and Indigenous People’s Affairs, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Guyana Forestry Commission and a legal consultant.
The statement said that the Task Force met on several occasions and visited Barama’s operations at Buck Hall, Essequibo, following which the legal consultant began reviewing the existing contract, forest concessions, and tax incentives previously granted to the company, while other members evaluated workers’ rights, value-added operations and environmental management practices, among other things.
