V G Siddhartha, owner of the Coffee Day group which controls 1.82 million acres of forest in Guyana through one of its subsidiaries has said that a processing centre for logs will be set up here but the main facility will be in India.
He did not say definitively when the processing centre will be set up here only telling the Indian newspaper, Business Standard, that it will be done “in a period of time.” Coffee Day set up its subsidiary here in 2010 with the promise of a processing plant. Currently, the company is working to set up a processing plant in Chikmagalur, India but is facing land issues. There is no indication that it is currently actively pursuing a processing plant here. Commissioner of Forests James Singh could not be reached for comment yesterday while Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment Robert Persaud is out of the country. The export of unprocessed logs has long been a concern of activists.
Siddhartha told the Business Standard that no law of the land had been breached. “On projects such as the one we are into, there is always bound to be some opposition from various stake holders. We got the
