Transparency, equity and objectivity are features of good governance

Aug 01, 2009 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
The Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) has issued a partial response to the first of my ten columns in Stabroek News on carbon in the forests of Guyana (“LCDS has been presented at numerous international meetings and is under serious consideration” SN Letters, July 29, 2009, and “GFC corrects inaccuracies on LCDS” GC Letters, July 29, 2009).  As so often, the GFC fails to get its facts in order before responding.
In my first article, I said that the LCDS website “is still under development at the time of writing and it is not possible to read about the feedback from the government’s traditional outreach meetings with some Amerindian communities in the hinterland”.  That is still the case, some weeks after submission of my series of articles to the Editor of Stabroek News. The LCDS web manager is only slowly putting up the partial records of these meetings.
Feedback on the hinterland consultations is supposed to entail provision of answers to questions, not just recording of the questions.  In other words, a multi-stakeholder process is intended to be a multi-way and iterative process, not the usual “we come, we speak, you listen, we go”.
As of today (July 29), the LCDS website displays records for all the 13 hinterland meetings. The GFC claims that the LCDS website reports of these meetings are verbatim.  That word means that the records are exact, word-for-word.  They clearly are not.  They are summaries of questions posed by participants, and these summaries have been challenged for their inaccuracies; see letters in Stabroek News on June 30 and Kaieteur News on 01 July.
There are also notable differences between the website reports and the newspaper accounts; see for example the reports on the Port Mourant meeting in Guyana Chronicle on July 13 and on the Linden meeting in Stabroek News on July 25.
If the President’s team of presenters did not include a shorthand recorder or record the meeting on audio tape it is not surprising that the accounts are only partial summaries.  But it is absurd to claim that they are verbatim.
There are two more serious points. The first is that the President’s team did not answer all the questions from the participants, and that the repeated assurances that questions would be answered have not been implemented.  At least, the LCDS website button for Responses is inactive.  The second point is that several reasonable and entirely predictable questions were raised repeatedly at the meetings but the President’s team appears to have made no attempt to amend its standard presentation to address these points, or to amend its website page on Frequently Asked Questions.
I note also that there are no reports on the LCDS website of the following presentations and Question/Answer sessions by the President’s team (in date order of the Guyana Chronicle accounts, some presentations were reported also by Stabroek News and Kaieteur News):
June 08, Launch of the LCDS by the President at the International Conference Centre.  The report of the question and answer session has been removed from the LCDS website.  Why?
June 18, University of Guyana.
June 24, National Communications Network.
June 30, Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners’ Association with Guyana Geology and Mines Commission.
July 04, Private Sector Commission.
July 15, Forest Products Association.
July 22, Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and Women’s Affairs Bureau.
July 24, Senior Media Operatives.
July 25, Guyana Defence Force.
July 28, Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
The failure to put up accounts of these presentations on the website appears to be contrary to the agreement with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) which is monitoring the consultation process for the Government of Norway.
I stand by my statement that the LCDS document “Transforming Guyana’s economy while combating climate change” speculates on the spending of unprecedented amounts of external funds for climate change adaptation.
Looking at pages 20-29 of the President’s document, the amount of space given to each budget item just doesn’t match the magnitude of the sums:
Hydropower, US$ 400-600 million, 1 paragraph.
Drainage, irrigation and roads for the Canje Basin and Intermediate Savannas, US$ 300-500 million, 1 paragraph.
Fibre Optic Cables / Technology Park, US$ 10-30 million, 1 paragraph.
Fruits and Vegetables, US$ 80-100 million, 2 paragraphs.
Aquaculture, US$ 135-175 million, 4 paragraphs.
Sustainable forestry and wood processing, no budget, 7 paragraphs.
Call centres, eco-tourism, bio-ethanol, no budget, 3 paragraphs.
Sea defence and mitigation of flooding in the coastal plain, more than US$1 billion, 9 paragraphs.
There are no references to supporting documents in the public domain to show how these ideas and budgets have been derived.  It is unclear how the President’s team expects serious citizen stakeholder responses when there is so little to work on.  I don’t want to suggest that the team has dreamed up these ideas from their hammocks, but please engage stakeholders in a more serious manner.
I have tried to track the presentation of the LCDS at “numerous international meetings” as Tasreef Khan of the GFC claims.  Using the reputable Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (“A neutral, authoritative and up-to-the-minute record of ongoing multilateral negotiations on environment and sustainable development”), I could only find two mentions:
14th meeting of the Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Poznan meeting, December 11, 2008 – http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop14/enbots/dec11.html – Valuing Opportunity Costs for Mitigation in High Forest Cover, Low Deforestation Rate Countries, Presented by Guyana; and the 17th meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York on May 13, 2009 – ENB volume 5 number 279 on  May 14  – CSD Highlights – http://www.iisd.ca/vol05/enb05279e.html.
The point apparently not grasped by the GFC is that these brief presentations in Ministerial segments of such meetings are not where the negotiations take place. If Guyana wants serious consideration of the LCDS then it has to participate in the technical committees which draft the papers and negotiate the budgets for the agendas of meetings such as the COP 15 climate summit meeting at Copenhagen in December this year.
Just appearing for the conference itself is not how international negotiation processes work.
I recognize that the GFC is engaged with the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (FCPF) but is the Office of Climate Change in the Office of the President similarly engaging with the technical committees of the UNFCCC or with the Coalition for Rainforest Nations of which Guyana is a member?  If so, why do we hear no information?  Why also does the GFC not publish on the FCPF negotiations, or even mention it on its website?
I am of course pleased to hear that the GFC is collaborating with other government agencies and the Forest Products Association on technical improvements, and that the GFC is seriously enforcing the forest legislation, rules and guidelines; but why is progress not reported in public?  And I do not mean the unverifiable claims made by the GFC in the tropical timber market reports circulated by the International Tropical Timber Organization.
For example – when is the GFC going to publish the strategic plan for rationalized allocation of forest area in the State Forests? When is the GFC going to make compliance with the Code of Practice on Timber Harvesting (2002) obligatory and equally for all the holders of long-term and supposedly sustainable Timber Sales Agreements, remembering that the Code includes provisions for reduced impact logging?
When will the field monitoring by the extra 50-60 rangers whose recruitment was announced by the Minister for Forestry in December 2006 result in a court case in which the alleged offences by holders of logging concessions are openly prosecuted?
Where are the “many independent reviews” published, which confirm that the GFC implementation of its guidelines is comparable to internationally accepted best practices?  Why are such reviews not published openly in Guyana?
I mention these points because transparency, equity and objectivity are features of good governance expected in the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (FCPF), and the GFC has already been notified by the Technical Advisory Panel of the FCPF that it, the GFC, needs to improve.
Janette Bulkan

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