Dear Editor,
I do hope that President Bharrat Jagdeo’s three foci for carbon management do not indicate yet further retreat from implementing national policies on sustainable forest management and local timber processing.
The President’s speech on December 5, 2008, to an invited audience at the Liliendaal Convention Centre (‘Guyana is foregoing needed money – President Jagdeo,’ KN, December 6, 2008 / ‘Guyana’s forest to be focus in Poland,’ KN, December 9, / ‘Guyana to press case at key UN climate talks,’ GC, December 9) mentioned (1) “a post-Kyoto climate agreement that creates incentives to rapidly slow tropical deforestation,” (2) “rigorous business cases for low carbon investment and employment opportunities in Guyana,” and (3) investment “infrastructure to protect our people and productive land from rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.”
The speech apparently said nothing about −
(a) the low rates of deforestation in the hinterland of Guyana because the soils are of such low natural fertility that they cannot sustain continuous commercial agriculture without currently uneconomic use of inorganic fertilisers;
(b) the persistent under-valuation of Guyana’s forests in spite of almost 15 years of external consultancies advocating more realistic pricing related to CIF values for timber in our main export markets;
(c) the complexity and arbitrariness of the forest taxes imposed by the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC), also contrary to expert advice;
(d) the failure to capture as revenue the excess rent which is now disappearing overseas with the unprocessed logs, contrary to national and PPP/C policy on local timber processing;
(e) the low rate of transfer of forest taxes from the GFC accounts to the Consolidated Fund;
(f) the reluctance or inability of the GFC to implement recommendations from 1999-2001 to prevent over-harvesting of commercially preferred timbers, and the consequent degradation of the public forest assets.
According to the unofficial spokesperson of the GFC (Vivian Li in ‘Guyana will continue to be an example in forestry practices,’ GC, November 20, 2008; and ‘Janette Bulkan’s assertions are misleading,’ KN, Novem-ber 20), the GFC at least recognises that production levels (in cubic metres of timber per hectare per harvest) should be less for cutting rates which are faster than the national (but still arbitrary) cutting cycle of 60 years between harvests. DTL operates on a 25-year cycle, the same as its TSA licence period. Barama operates on either 25 or 40 years, depending on which document you read. Nobody cuts on the 60 year cycle. What the GFC has failed to do, at least since 2002, is to ensure that lower harvest volumes per hectare are also associated with higher limits on minimum tree sizes which can be felled. For most timbers, the GFC sets a national cutting limit of 34 cm in diameter (a few timbers have a 19 cm diameter limit) but for sustainable production the 1999-2001 GFC studies showed that cutting limits should be 50 cm or above. The cutting limit should be 90 cm, not 34 cm, for popular and heavily over-cut commercial species. Moreover, the GFC fails to use yield predictions geared to the main timbers, and hence fails to set harvest limits specific to those timbers, although it has had the techniques to do so since the late 1990s.
Without these precautions, the second timber harvest would be around one quarter of the first harvest, and perhaps only 6 per cent at the third harvest. In no other country could this be claimed as sustainable forest management.
If the GFC has neglected for almost a decade to implement the technical recommendations for sustainable forest management, and fails to collect enough revenue to finance sustainable forest management, how does the President (as Minister of Forests) imagine that Guyana could implement a post-Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation?
How disappointing, also, that the presidential thinking prepared by McKinsey consultants and Conservation International failed to be presented to the United Nations climate conference in Poznan, Poland, for compilation into the conference document ‘The Little REDD Book.’ Nineteen government and 13 non-government proposals are presented, but no mention of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Mahadeo Kowlessar
