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.
