The four largest Asian-owned loggers control legally, and by renting landlorded concessions, well over half of Guyana's allocated state Forest

The four largest Asian-owned loggers control legally, and by renting landlorded concessions, well over half of Guyana's allocated state Production Forest

Saturday, April 14th 2007
Stabroek News
http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56518192

Dear Editor, May I clarify some errors in the letter by Trevor Atkinson captioned "Patrio-tism or Hypocrisy?" (KN 07.04.10) please, as he refers to some of my notes on the forest sector, published in Stabroek News. "Landlording" is the practice in which the legal holder of a forest harvesting concession gives up managerial control and rents it out to another enterprise. This practice is illegal under Forest Regulations 1953, Article 12, which states - "No transfer of any lease or timber sales agreement shall be made by any forest officer without the prior approval of the President where such lease or timber sales agreement grants exclusive rights to any person over an area estimated to exceed three thousand acres or is for an unexpired period exceeding three years". Landlording is illegal un-der Condition 13 of Timber Sales Agreement which states. "The grantee shall not transfer, sublet, mortgage or otherwise dispose of any interest arising under this agreement except in accordance with the Forest Regulations and any purported disposition made except in accordance with such regulations shall be null and void." Mr Atkinson and a previous writer, Paul Taylor, claim that Condition 14 of the Timber Sales Agreement allows sub-letting. It does not. Landlording is differentiated from "sprinting" which was a long-standing practice by which concession holders would contract in labour for specific tasks, but without in any way passing on managerial control. "Sprinting" is a way of keeping recurrent costs low but being able to respond to specific orders for timber. Sprinting is useful to companies which have limited marketing skills and so respond to orders but do not positively market Guyana's wonderful timbers. The recent Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by SamLing Global Limited, the parent company for Barama, specifically mentions 445,000 hectares of Guyana's forest over which it claims to hold timber "rights" in addition to the 1.61 million hectares of its own concession TSA 04/1991. These 445,000 hectares include the Amerindian titled Village Lands of Akawini and St Monica, over which the Guyana Forestry Commission has no mandate and for which Barama negotiated "in bad faith" agreements; consequently, under the Amerin-dian Act 2006, these two agreements are void yet the Government allows logging to continue! This illegality was one of several which led to the suspension in January this year of the FSC certification of Barama. Does this distinction between sprinting and landlording matter? Yes, because Government neglect has allowed Barama to extend its legal control of 26 per cent of State Production Forest allocated for harvesting by a further and mostly illegal 7 per cent. The four largest Asian-owned loggers control legally, and by renting landlorded concessions, well over half of Guyana's allocated State Production Forest. SamLing's IPO documents show that Barama is preferentially logging outside its own concession, in these landlorded areas. In the last five years, Barama has drawn 56-72 per cent of its logs from landlorded areas, and exported almost all of the logs unprocessed to Asia. This log export is entirely against the spirit of the generous tax concessions given by our Government and contrary to the value-added policies of Guyana and of the PPP/C (in its 2006 election manifesto). In addition, the IPO documents show that Barama has no intention of sustainable forest management in these landlorded areas, reckoning to log them out by 2015. This diversion of logs to Asia inevitably reduces possibilities for adding value in Guyana by our nationally-owned companies. So is Guyana recovering some value by taxing the excess profit on logs? No, even though this profit is vast and the Caribbean regional forest officer of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has agreed with me that a variable rate tax is more economically beneficial to Guyana than the complicated ban proposed by the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC). And is this booming trade in logs to Asia being properly recorded, as promised by the Minister for Forestry at the log export meeting on 17 February 2007? No, logs are being loaded without GFC or Customs oversight on unsupervised wharves. And what is the effect? The discrepancies between Guyana's official export data and Chinese Customs' import data are so great that our situation will be exposed as an example of bad export practice at a meeting in Europe in early May on ""Illegal Logging and Related Trade: Measuring the Local Response". How shameful that our Government allows our country to be held up as an international example of bad practice. Yours faithfully, Janette Bulkan