Dear Editor,
In two articles in KN the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) has been protesting about being taken to court by Toolsie Persaud Ltd (TPL) over activities in forest logging concession TSA 04/1985 which expired and should have been closed in December 2007 (‘TPL fined $80.2M for timber breaches’ (1.5.08), and ‘Forestry monitoring – Guyana turning to Brazil for help in
using satellite imagery,’ (3.5.08).
During 2007-8, between 30 and 60 new forest rangers have been deployed by the GFC (numbers vary with different GFC press conferences), yet the various instructions said to have been issued to concession holders in 2006-7 do not appear on the GFC website as distinct from the general guidelines for forest operations from 2002 or earlier. From the figures in the KN article on May 1, TPL was logging illegally at an intensity of over 18 m3 per hectare, more than twice as much as Barama in the days when that company was being monitored by the Edinburgh Centre for Tropical Forestry. I suggest that this is just incredible.
Why have there been no prosecutions arising from the scrutiny of these rangers during these last 16 months?
The KN article on May 3 indicates that landlording by Guyanese concession holders to Barama has been stopped by the GFC, yet unprocessed logs are continuing to be exported in large quantities. Nearly 6,000 m3 of logs went to China in January and over 4,000 m3 in February. India was the destination of over 1,000 m3 in January and over 2,000 m3 in February.
Those 13,540 m3 were predominantly the timbers of flooring and furniture quality and could have generated furniture worth between US$12 million and US$19 million through on-shore processing. The log export ban mentioned by the Minister for Forestry Robert Persaud on December 8, 2006 and broadly supported in February 2007 by 350 stakeholders has not begun to be implemented by the GFC.
There should be an independent inquiry into the governance of the forest sector. As the government is not allowing an independent inquiry into the operations of the Guyana Revenue Authority it is presumably also too scared of the cans of worms in the forest sector. Let us hope that the can is opened by the TPL case.
Yours faithfully,
Mahadeo Kowlessar
