Dear Editor,
According to your section ‘Article 13’s call for log exports ban misinformed – Forestry Commission’ (SN November 23, 2021), the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) criticized the call for an immediate ban on log exports as ‘misinformed, emotional and nonfactual’. However, local sawmills and lumber yards have had increasing difficulties in procuring logs of their preferred timbers such as Greenheart, Purpleheart and Kabukalli. If the GFC is managing the State Forests as sustainably as it claims, why is the shortage of preferred timbers becoming more obvious locally?
From 2005 up to 2018 we could read the GFC’s Forest Sector Information Report half-yearly or annually, and the GFC’s own Annual Report (a statutory requirement) up to 2017. From 2007 up to April 2019, for most months, we could also read a monthly export report for forest products. These sets of reports became briefer and less informative over time, with less and less information about individual timbers. Some data on production and export of the more popular timbers we could recover after 2-3 years publication delay from the International Tropical Timber Organization, even if the GFC would not publish those data locally. Evidently, the GFC is happy to see our prime timbers exported unprocessed to China and India, rather than implement the National Forest Strategy and Plan (last versions published in 2018) which call for greater in-country processing.
So is this simply a distributional issue, with the log traders earning a much higher income from export of raw logs than from supplying mills in Guyana? In the SN article, the GFC claims that only 20 per cent of logs are exported, 80 per cent are processed locally. But those overall quantities would not prevent a high proportion of the Purpleheart, Kabukalli, Tatabu, Shibadan, Darina and Locust from being exported, and only species like Keriti that are not desired by log traders being easily available locally.
During the period, January to July 2020, the average declared FOB value of a cubic metre of log was US$172 or G$34,401 [31,435 m3 of ‘logs’ were exported, declared value of US$5,407,066]. The CIF value of that log at a Chinese port is generally three or four times higher. Chinese manufacturers gain, Guyana loses. The GFC uses the same grossed-up treatment of data in its statements about the forest management: ‘Guyana can practice selective logging at the rate of 20m3 per hectare over a 60-year cycle’. Indeed, that was a figure derived from research in the 1980s and 1990s by the Dutch PhD students in the Stichting Tropenbos Guyana programme. But the 20 m3/ha were for all commercial species together. The intention was not that a log-exporting concession holder could take all 20 m3 from Purpleheart alone, leaving behind all the less desirable species.
The intention to manage sustainably all of Guyana’s timber species is made clear in the second edition of the GFC Code of Practice (2002, Section 2.3 Yield Regulation, Page 8) – ‘However, these measures alone are insufficient to ensure sustained productivity of the (remaining) forest and to retain sufficient growing stock of most of the desirable, high value species. Instead, sustained yields can only be ensured if a minimum stocking is retained after logging for each individual desirable species. GFC recently developed growth and yield models that can assist in determining the number of trees that can be felled per ha as well as the minimum size (diameter) for each individual species. This means that individual tree-marking rules need to be developed for each particular forest type under different stand conditions. Yield regulation is an area of active GFC policy and research.’
A little earlier, in March 2000, Neil Bird had also pointed out in his GFC paper that a uniform 60-year timber rotation made little sense in Guyana when tree growth rates varied so much between species; ‘The implications of a sixty-year felling cycle: the broader picture’. At that time, the GFC had both empirical tree growth and survival models (from Denis Alder) and estimates based on tree physiology from the Edinburgh University modelling group (led by Peter Phillips and Paul van Gardingen). GFC staff contributed to this research and were trained in the use of the various models.
By the time of the Third Edition of the GFC Code of Practice in 2014, the GFC had retreated from study and application of species-specific tree growth rates, and had been allowing Barama to move from a focus on plywood production to being the main exporter of raw logs to China, concentrating on just a few species, and so, heavily exceeding the sustainable rates for Purpleheart. We know this, not because GFC released the information, but because Barama’s parent company, SamLing Global Ltd., disclosed the information in its Initial Public Offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007. This selective over-harvesting was continued by Bai Shan Lin, the company partly owned by the Government of China, and contrary to the guidelines on forestry issued by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.
The consequence of this continued and unsustainable drain on the best timbers of Guyana is evident in the local shortages which have been growing worse. If the GFC disagrees with this evidence and reasoning, it should disclose the timber-specific volume and price data for each species and logging/exporting company, in its return for the Third Annual Report to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), with independent audit verification. The GFC should also return to publishing data each month. We should note the unreliability of export data, as shown in the first annual EITI report for Guyana for the year 2017, which included reports of timbers which only grow in West Africa being exported as logs from Guyana. Editor, if the GFC will not publish accurate and verified supporting data, it cannot expect that the people in Guyana will believe its claims.
Sincerely,
Janette Bulkan
