Guyana and the Wider World (Part 4)

Extracted From: http://guyanaforestry.blogspot.com/2007/03/guyana-and-wider-world-part-4.html

Guyana and the Wider World
Guyana's Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme (PRSP) and the forestry
sector (Part 4)
By Janette Bulkan
Stabroek News
Sunday, February 25, 2007

Today's column considers the relation of interior/forestryroads to development within the context of the third cause singled out by the PRSP as contributory to endemic poverty: the absence of noncomplementing growth-oriented infrastructure (PRSP 2001, p. 7). This analysis is undertaken in the context of the question: Why is there persistent poverty in the interior alongside the parcelling out of
Guyana's best endowed forests in largescale forestry concessions?

There is a long-standing world-wide debate over whether forest roads facilitate forest degradation and illegal logging or stimulate conservation efforts; whether interior roads instigate social conflict by displacing indigenous groups or provide market access to economic goods for hinterland communities; and whether they promote jobs and local economic development or only favour the trade interests of
large-scale timber producers. The short answer in most places is that under a regulatory framework which is implemented to maximise public good and not private interests, roads - feeder or forest roads, indeed all interior roads and trails - can spell sustainable development. In Guyana the regulatory framework is the Road Administration Division (RAD) of the Ministry of Public Works and Communications. However, away from the coast, RAD's reach is weak if not non-existent.

Among the constraints facing the RAD which are listed in the National Development Strategy 1996 are: weak institutional status; limited institutional capacity (critically short of technical staff); inadequate financial resources and lack of equipment (NDS, chapter 38).At least in its early years, the Guyana Natural Resources Agency intended to aid private sector constructors to rationalise alignments of logging and mining roads in the national interest The Guyana
Integrated Natural Resources Information System (GINRIS) developed with German (GTZ) aid in the late 1990s and available at the Guyana Lands & Surveys Commission HQ is an excellent tool for joint planning and display of hinterland road alignments relative to logging and mining concessions. Why is GINRIS not more used and made publicly accessible?

Five years later, the PRSP does not mention any improvement in the status or resources of the RAD, noting that "the capacity of the RAD… will also be strengthened" (PRSP, 2001, p. 43).

In the absence of a functioning regulatory framework, private interests can (but not always) prevail over public good. Some of the public allweather roads have been constructed and/or maintained by mining and logging companies - notably the Omai Company's maintenance of 72 km of road from Wismar to the Omai Junction on the Essequibo River (Demerara Timbers Ltd. contributed G$200,000 a month to Omai for this road maintenance); DTL also maintains the road between Omai Junction and
Kuruduni, while the mining company, ETK, has upgraded the Iteballi to Turoparu trail.

The large logging companies build roads in their concessions (and through Amerindian titled lands and in concessions they rent illegally)in order to get logs out.

Many of these roads are built in contravention of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1996 guidelines [http://www.epaguyana.org/d ownloads/Volume5Forestry% 20EIA%20guidelines.pdf].

Private companies like the IWPI operating in Akawini and St Monica have disregarded the need for a permit from the EPA prior to building logging roads and loggingtitled Amerindian village lands.

The road building guidelines in the GFC Code of Practice for Timber Harvesting (second edition, November 2002, which follow best-practice indications from the Forestry Department of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization) are still voluntary for the longerestablished logging concessions.

In the absence of coordination among agencies like the GFC and EPA with the RAD, as recommended in the NDS, an opportunity to maximise the public good by requiring timber companies to follow official coordination and regulation of road-building in the interior is lost.

The logging industry, for its part, has complained for many years about the high cost of building and maintaining forest roads in a country where roadstone is not naturally well distributed and rainfall is high.The National Forest Plan (NFP) recognises this problem: "The establishment of primary access roads by concessionaires in the permanent production forests shall be co-ordinated and regulated in accordance with national development strategies, to improve the road
infrastructure of Guyana's hinterland" (Part IV, section A 1); and "Special fiscal rewards shall be provided to concessionaires who establish primary access roads which meet appropriate forest engineering standards, which can form part of a national road development programme" (Part IV, section B 1).

However, the Ministry of Transport and the GFC do not seem to have either a coordinated roading plan or any published incentive scheme for roadbuilding loggers.

The effects of an absence of official coordination and regulation of road-building in the interior are evident in the 'frontier-like'condition where some logging companies which have built roads arrogate to themselves the right of passage through those roads, sometimes with fatal consequences.

At the Barama Company Limited's Public Stakeholder meeting on February 28, 2005, the then Commissioner of Geology and Mines and the employer of a dead gold miner held Barama responsible for the latter's death after the company's refusal to allow him passage on a road running through its concession.