Barama harvesting legally outside its concession - Commissioner of Forests

http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56524104

Barama harvesting legally outside its concession - Commissioner of
Forests
Stabroek News,
Sunday, July 8th 2007

The Guyana Forestry Com-mission (GFC) maintains that Barama Company
Limited (BCL) is acting within the confines of the law when it harvests
timber from outside its own concession, a practice that observers have
deemed illegal.

Commissioner of Forests James Singh, told Stabroek News on Wednesday
that Barama's Timber Sales Agreement allowed it to engage in
contractual arrangements with smaller logging companies. In this way,
Barama harvested from these concessions in exchange for capital
investment in those companies' operations.

Singh said that in any such arrangement, the specific area of the
concession to be harvested must be clearly identified and approved by
the GFC before any harvesting took place. Also, both the company and
subcontractor must act within the confines of the forestry laws and the
GFC's Codes of Practice.

Barama's General Manager Girwar Lalaram, at one of the company's press
conferences, had said the company was making significant investment in
areas where their smaller concessionaire contractors were located,
because frequently those companies were unable to make the investment
to harvest their concessions. "This [arrangement] is definitely not
outside of the forestry laws," Singh said.

Lalaram had said that the third party arrangement that Barama had with
small concessionaires was of mutual benefit. He called Barama's
reliance on smaller concessions more of a social decision rather than
an economic one and insisted that the company was putting in much
needed infrastructure, such as roads, bridges and other structures in
those areas outside its concession. Lalaram had also maintained that
the company was using the smaller concessions to boost its capacity in
peeler logs, used in the manufacture of plywood. The practice of
subletting is one of the factors which caused BCL's certification with
the Forest Stewardship Council to be suspended in February for three
months.

Janette Bulkan, in one of her articles in this newspaper earlier this
year, said that in addition to its legal control over 1.61 million
hectares, Barama had harvesting rights for a further 445,000 hectares
and this included 47,000 ha legally held in State Forest Exploratory
Permit. She also said that the extra 408,000 hectares were "illegally
rented" from other nominal concession holders or illegally contracted
from titled Amerindian Village Lands. Bulkan said that Barama's parent
company Samling acknowledged in their IPO prospectus that they rented
more than 400,000 hectares of concessions from third parties. "This is
clear evidence for large-scale illegal logging since land lording
[concession renting] is illegal according to Guyanese laws. Sub-letting
and renting of all classes of forest harvesting concessions are against
forest law and concession conditions in Guyana, without special
permission," she wrote.

However, Singh does not agree with the acreage of the 'outside'
concessions as given by Bulkan and he has undertaken to make available
the correct figures in due course.

Bulkan is adamant that such activities should lead to suspension or
cancellation of the concession.

She said too that there was no evidence from the GFC's Board of
Directors that special permissions had been requested or granted in any
of these cases, with one temporary exception.

Writing on the issue recently, columnist Christopher Ram said that
"land lording" arises because domestic enterprises simply cannot
compete with Barama as the company pays no tax on spares and fuel which
attract very high rates of tax. "One such enterprise told me that with
such an uneven playing field, it had no choice but to effectively give
over the operation of its concession to Barama with severe loss of
employment," he said.

Ram wrote that Barama represented a total failure of every sector of
the government to set up any meaningful and responsible relationship
between the company and the country.

"It would be wrong to place all the blame on the company which is
simply taking advantage of terribly poor supervision by all the
regulators," he said. Ram said that given the importance of the
forestry resources to the future of the country, the only solution he
could see was a complete review of the company's compliance with the
laws and regulations of the country.