Guyana and the wider world
Back at the forest floor - what's going on?
By Janete Bulkan
Stabroek News
Sunday, April 1st 2007
Today's column marks the end of this ten-part series on Guyana's forest
sector. In previous columns I outlined the results of the failure to
put existing forest law and national policies into effect, or to
integrate the sector within the larger economy and society. This final
column highlights the abuse of our fragile and unique Guiana Shield
forests, including the excessive rates of selective cutting of premium
timber hardwoods in the areas controlled legally and illegally by the
Asian timber companies.
ASI - Accreditation Services International GmbH carried out its annual
audit of SGS (the company which first issued, then suspended, a Forest
Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate of good forest management to the
Barama Company), in November 2006. Its report catalogued a number of
failures by the certified company to comply with the FSC's Principles
and Criteria, including the lack of a public summary for the management
plan for the certified compartment 4 (378,596 ha)
(www.accreditation-services. com/ Documents/ ASI-Forest%20
Manage-ment%20Audit-Guyana-SGS-2006-Final.pdf). Incidentally, the
Timber Sales Agreement 04/91, the compartment boundary and logging
block and harvest area maps, the forest management and other
operational plans for Barama are not in the public domain. The Foreign
Direct Investment (FDI) arrangement negotiated by cabinet in February
1991 is only in the public domain because it was leaked in the
mid-1990s and extracts have been published by Marcus Colchester of the
World Rainforest Movement in 1997.
In addition, the Barama Company's own documentation issued for the
Initial Public Offering (IPO) of its parent Company SamLing Global
Limited on the Hong Kong stock exchange shows that the company is
cutting larger areas per year (about 50 per cent more) than is
compatible with the length of the felling cycle, that is, the time is
takes for forest re-growth before a logger can come back to cut
commercial-sized trees again in the same spot. Barama is not following
the precautions concerning felling cycles for individual species
mentioned on page 8 in the GFC Code of Practice for Timber Harvesting
(2nd edition, November 2002). The harvesting practices of the JaLing
company also violate these mandatory guidelines of the GFC.
Let us first consider extraction rates. SGS Qualifor quoted in February
2006 average extraction rates of 8-11 m3/ha by the Barama Company. What
is certain is that the Barama Company can only claim to be maintaining
an extraction rate that is far below the allowable harvest of 20 m3/ha
for a 40-year felling cycle if all timber species are lumped together.
However, the Code of Practice requires precaution against over-cutting
of individual species, and this precaution is not being followed. In
other words, Barama is 'creaming' the forest rapidly for a small number
of high-value timbers, most of which are being exported as unprocessed
logs to Asia, contravening both national policies in Guyana and the
intentions of Barama's foreign direct investment (FDI) arrangements.
These contraventions have been mentioned publicly by the Minister for
Forestry in his press conference on December 8, 2006
(http://www.stabroeknews.com
id=56509485).
The Barama Company's TSA 04/1991 has a gross area of 1.61 million ha,
of which the net operable area is said to be 1.05 million ha. The
Barama Company determined that there were only 172,000 ha operable out
of 582,000 ha in compartments 1-3 located in the Port Kaituma area.
Barama cut over that 30 per cent of its TSA during 1993-2001. In other
words, the company cut 22,000 ha per year in an 8-year period. GFC's
standard felling cycle is 60 years so Barama should not have been
cutting more than 17,500 ha per year. Barama has argued that its
plywood timbers such as baromalli grow faster and therefore it should
be allowed a 40-year felling cycle. That would mean 26,200 ha per year,
which corresponds to its rate for compartments 1-3 when the Edinburgh
Centre for Tropical Forestry (ECTF) was monitoring on site.
Now consider the cutting rates in Barama's other compartments after
ECTF and DFID technical foresters had departed:
Compartments 4-5: gross area 589,000 ha, net operable area 497,000 ha
or 84 per cent of the gross area (apparently better or easier forest),
scheduled for 2004-2017. The company projects to cut over these two
compartments in 14 years which equals cutting over 36,000 ha per year,
which is twice as fast as the GFC's 60-year cycle (17,500 ha per year)
and almost 40 per cent faster than a possibly negotiable 40-year cycle
(26,200 ha per year).
Compartments 6-7: gross area 440,000 ha, net operable area 379,000 ha
or 86 per cent, scheduled for 2018-2027. The company projects to cut
over these two compartments in 10 years which equals cutting over
38,000 ha per year. This projected rate of extraction is similar to
compartments 4 and 5. It is 45 per cent too fast even for a 40-year
felling cycle.
The Asian logging companies, including the Barama Company, are highly
selective in the timbers they are logging. As this column and many
letter writers over the past year have shown, they are extracting and
shipping out the prime hardwood timbers, primarily greenheart and
purpleheart, and at declared prices which are far below international
CIF prices for technically comparable timbers from other tropical
countries. As last week's column mentioned, the Barama Company supplies
about half of the timber needs of its downstream timber processing
businesses in China; high-value office flooring - which we should be
able to produce in Guyana. Meanwhile, Barama has downsized its own
plywood business while other timber value added businesses are severely
hampered by the scarcity of the same timbers that are exported legally
and illegally ('baptised' under other names).
If this is bad, then page 8 of the Letter from the Board of the
Seapower Company documents a worse disregard for the GFC's Code of
Practice. JaLing grants its W & J Forest Resources Development Limited
(owned 50 per cent by JaLing and 50 per cent by Chu Wenze for Danny
Chan) the right to harvest 200,000 m3 per year. Reckoning on the GFC
harvest limit of 20 m3 per ha, and an overall harvestable volume of 2.8
million m3, this means a net operable area of 140,000 ha and a harvest
cycle of 14 years (15 years in the Letter), followed by 25 years of
fallow. This is not sustainable forest management in the sense of GFC's
Code of Practice on Timber Harvesting. These amount to piratical
cut-and-clear-out single-cut operations in forest areas controlled
legally and illegally by JaLing. Given current intensities of logging,
it is likely that the Chinese contractor Wuchang will extract much less
than 20 m3 per ha, so it will cut over more hectares per year to
achieve its 200,000 m3 target, and so rip through in even less than 15
years.
Guyanese might well ask: who was the bright spark proposing this
pillage? One of the suspects is an ex-Barama manager, also active in
the preparation of similar management plans for Karlam and Timber World
and a host of other carpet-bagging Asian timber companies. This
ex-Barama manager is also a shareholder in some of the companies, and
he acts as a go-between these companies and the state regulatory
agency. The question is: who is monitoring Guyana's interests,
including the pillaged forests, as required by Article 36 of the
National Constitution? - "In the interests of the present and future
generations, the State will protect and make rational use of its land,
mineral and water resources…" And why has the GFC taken its Code of
Practice for Timber Harvesting off its website?
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