The Forestry Commission seems to be making a long overdue attempt to
restore its operational mandate
Stabroek News, Friday, February 8th 2008
Dear Editor,
I would like to clarify some of the arguments between the Guyana
Forestry Commission (GFC) and the wood processing industry. After five
years of minimal effective activity the GFC appears to be recovering a
sense of its responsibilities for administration of the 13.7 million
hectares of State Forests and the economic products from those forests
as shown in its responses to letters in the newspapers.
Communications
The GFC website contains some documents but not others which the
industry should be able to access readily. Now available are the Code
of Practice on Timber Harvesting (second edition 2002) and a sufficient
set of guidelines for pre-harvest inventories and all required forest
management and annual operational plans, all important for the logging
concessionaires.
The processors are served by the Wood Processing Standards and
Procedures (September 2007). Missing from that website are the existing
forest law and regulations (from 1953), the forestry chapter 14 of the
National Development Strategy (1996), the national forest policy (1997)
or the national forest plan (2001). Also missing is any background
document to explain and rationalise the new standards for "sawmills,
sawpits, lumberyards and timber depots".
The claim by the Minister for Forestry of public consultation appears
to mean only set presentations to GFC-selected stakeholders without
meaningful feedback and revision from non-government stakeholders. The
absence of record of such public consultations is also disappointing,
as the GFC's claim to have responded cannot be demonstrated.
Legislation
In letters to and a column in the press during 2006-7, Janet Bulkan has
shown that the GFC has mainly adequate legislation and regulations to
administer the State Forests, does have the right to direct the
loggers, and has publicly-available guidance for them, although not
publicising the law and regulations themselves. The GFC undermines its
authority by claiming administrative discretion when no such latitude
is contained in the law: GFC Public Relations Officer Jaime Hall "said
that the Commission does have a degree of flexibility with some
concessionaires"
(Kaieteur News January 16, 2008). In contrast, the Minister has
reiterated that concessionaires will be treated alike, especially as
members of the Forest Products Association have already been favoured
with extra time to fulfil their obligations and cancel their huge
debts. Note that there are some 300 small-scale loggers (with 2-year
State Forest Permissions), some 58 members of the FPA, and only 24
active large-scale logging concessions.
As regards forest products, the law enables the Minister to prescribe
standards for forest produce from State forests (Article 42 (f)),
provide for the grading of forest produce from State forests and
[prohibit or regulate] the sale of forest produce falling below
prescribed standards (Article 42 (g)), prohibit or regulate the
construction, erection or operation of sawmills and the importation of
sawmilling machinery (Article 42 (j)) and register premises wherein
timber is stored or kept for the purposes of a sawmill (Article 42
(k)).
In addition, under Regulation 26 (4) for sawmills, the Minister may
issue a permit subject to such conditions as he may think fit.
The guidelines for sawmills on the GFC website consist of a
presentation dated 18 September 2007. This presentation is a
photographic comparison between the physical conditions apparently
representative of sawmills in Guyana and conditions representing best
practice in one or more mills at Belém, Brazil. The photographic
comparison is followed by imperative instructions and some
recommendations.
No justification is offered in this document for the detailed
prescriptions about sawing specifications, lumber dimensions or timber
stack rules, nor for restricting chainsaw milling.
No tests are offered in this document for judging compliance with the
instructions, some of which are ambiguous. The document appears to
prescribe for lumber processing as if only a single market is being
supplied, and this has been reasonably challenged by Anthony Lim and A
Tahal.
It is unclear if this unsigned GFC presentation is an expression of the
Ministerial authority granted under Article 42 of the forest law. It
would be reasonable for the forest industry to seek legal advice and to
request the rationale behind the details. Presumably the Forest
Products Association and the Guyana Manufacturers and Services
Association will be combining to make such request to the Minister, in
accordance with the Minister's reiterated intention to cooperate with
industry?
Limit of GFC authority
The GFC appears to have overlooked or concealed from the public that
the authority to prescribe standards and to grade forest produce (for
the local market) is limited to output from State forests. Produce from
private lands or titled Amerindian Village Lands is not subject to GFC
rules. How can the various sources be differentiated?
The bar-code tags introduced partially since 1999 can reliably indicate
the source of the timber only if someone physically verifies that one
part of the tag is attached to the stump of the tree in an authorised
coupe (tree felling area). But the GFC has physically lacked the
capacity to make such verifications, because it does not devote enough
resources to objective and transparently administered field monitoring.
It cannot claim to be short of money for such purposes because it is
required to value and tax the resource access rights for the benefit of
the nation, and I have demonstrated the huge excess profits being
obtained by the under-taxed loggers and log exporters.
So timber tags are widely traded in the hinterland as a form of
currency, and in practice the GFC cannot be definite that any one log
or board comes from inside or outside State forest. Thus the GFC
appears to have no effective authority to impose its September 2007
guidelines as legal prescriptions on the forest products industry.
The GFC delay in issuing mill licences for 2008 appears to be
unjustified and worth legal challenge.
Legality Assurance System
In order to comply with its legal mandate and having prudent regard for
the possibility that Guyanese timber without proof of legality of
origin may be barred from government procurement contracts in EU
countries, the GFC has begun to re-develop the stalled timber tagging
scheme. External donors provided the funds for ProForest Oxford to
devise an EU-compatible legality assurance system, and the
International Tropical Timber Organization is funding the second phase.
This phase includes the long-delayed installation of a country-wide
distributed database on forest production and the integration of the
database with bar-code hand-held readers. I hope that the GFC is not
relying on technology to compensate for a shortfall in field presence.
That has not worked in other countries, nor does GFC control of the
database match international best practice.
Moreover, the GFC proposal to ITTO indicates that this control is
explicitly for restraining illegal operations by small-scale operators,
apparently leaving the economically much more significant large-scale
loggers in their long accustomed freedom from GFC supervision.
The token penalties imposed through Presidential insistence in October
2007 and January 2008 are hardly likely to deter loggers who are making
super-profits.
In summary, the GFC appears to be making a long overdue attempt to
restore its operational mandate for State forests but is ineptly
drafting unworkable and apparently illegal rules outside its mandate.
Given the super-profits which the Asian-owned loggers and exporters
have been making, Guyana deserves better from the GFC and from the
Minister for Forestry.
Yours faithfully,
Mahadeo Kowlessar
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