Illegal logging in Guyana is worse than admitted

Illegal logging in Guyana is worse than admitted by the Guyana Forestry Commission

Wednesday, January 17th 2007
Dear Editor,
StabroekNews

In February 2006, the Guyana Forestry Commission and the Forest Products Association issued a glossy brochure which claimed "Guyana is probably the only country in the world with a complete national log tracking system. Forest produce originating in Guyana and used in any part of the world can be tracked directly to the stump of the tree the wood was taken from.

The log tracking system provides detectable evidence on the legitimacy, location and magnitude of forest operations and is currently applied to all forestry operations including State Forests, Amerindian Reservations and Private Properties . . . All forest produce including logs, lumber piles, poles and posts are tagged ..."

Less than a year later, Paul Taylor in a letter captioned "Illegal logging is lower in Guyana than in many other countries" (07.01.15) admits that "The GFC will never be able to come up with a complete, robust system to stop illegal trade in its entirety". This admission is followed by a number of allegations against exporters and furniture manufacturers which almost entirely negate the GFC claims from February 2006. In part this is because the GFC has failed to install and operate the timber tagging system as it was designed in 1999. Instead, as the Forest Products Marketing Council (FPMC) admits on its website, the tagging system is used principally to penalise the small-scale national forestry sector. In the words of the FPMC: "By far the most significant findings and implications are those from a social perspective. The Log Tracking System has exposed and hence reduced the number of illegal operations especially the chainsaw operations".

The Royal Institute of International Affairs (http:// www.illegal-logging.info) has adopted a broader definition of illegal logging than the GFC or the FPMC:

"Illegal logging takes place when timber is harvested, transported, bought or sold in violation of national laws. The harvesting process itself may be illegal, including corrupt means to gain access to forests, extraction without permission from protected areas, cutting of protected species, or extraction of timber in excess of agreed limits. Illegalities may also occur during transport, including illegal processing and export, misdeclaration to customs, and avoidance of taxes and other charges."

More serious is the illegal logging undertaken by the foreign-owned companies which are receiving subsidies from Guyana through foreign direct investment (FDI) arrangements agreed by the Cabinet, for local industrial processing and value adding. These subsidies are then abused to support the huge expansion in export of unprocessed logs; exports happily documented month by month by the Guyana Forest Products Marketing Council.

This illegal logging is being carried out in forest harvesting concessions sub-let by members of the Forest Products Association. The sub-letting is against the National Forest Policy (1997, part I, B3(d)). The GFC Board of Directors should rescind such abused concessions and return the forest areas to the pool available for re-allocation under the Strategic Plan (National Forest Plan, 2001, NFP300) and National Forest Policy (1997, part III, B3). The widespread practice of landlording forest harvesting concessions to foreign contractors makes a nonsense of GFC strategic allocation of State Production Forests. The GFC should not be permitted to condone this practice, which is against the law without explicit Presidential app-roval (Forest Regulations 1953, Article 12) and specific clauses in the concession licences (for example, TSA clause 13). Through this sub-letting, four foreign-owned logging companies have extended their legal 38 per cent control of allocated State Production Forest by 14 per cent (more than 870,000 hectares), so that Asian loggers now control well over half the forest allocated by the GFC for harvesting. This amounts to rampant illegal logging, on a scale that dwarfs the infractions of the national chainsaw logging sector.

Yours faithfully,

Janette Bulkan