BLAME IT ON THE RAIN!

Mar 22, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There is a blame game taking place in relation to the exportation of a container of lumber in which cocaine was found. The discovery was made in Jamaica when the container was taken off the exporting vessel.
The Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) and the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) have been both trading exchanges about who did what and who was supposed to do what. This is quite mystifying considering that each has a specific role in relation to exports and neither can be said to be duplicating the role of the other.
There is a difference between the certification of lumber exports for quality control and other regulatory purposes and the checking of exports to ensure that there is no illegal substances secreted within.
The exchanges started with the boast by one official of knowing who was behind the shipment and indicating that the nation would be surprised when they learn the identity. Then the blame game started with each side attempting to indicate that it was the responsibility of the other to check the container and then later that the container was switched from one ship to other.
Guyana in the meantime is being made to look foolish because if at this preliminary level, it is hard to decide which agency has responsibility for checking the exports, then imagine how more difficult it is going to be to determine just who was behind the shipment and how the container was moved from one vessel to the other.
Each side seems determined to establish that it was not at fault and perhaps this is where the real problem is. No side should be afraid to admit that its inspection or lack of inspections efforts may have been at fault. No organization can be perfect and even in the best of inspecting organizations, there will be successful attempts to avoid detection of illegal activities.
The drugs that get into the United States do so despite that country having superior inspection and detection capabilities. So the fact that drugs were exported in lumber does not automatically imply that the local organizations are not functioning.
What is important is that when a case such as the present one occurs an assessment is done to ascertain how the drugs got on board and whether there were any flaws or oversight involved. Instead of making this assessment, however, what we are having is most embarrassing blame -game taking place with each side attempting to establish its role as regards the exportation of goods.
Those roles are known and therefore each side, instead of quarreling about who is responsible for doing what, each side should be ascertaining whether in respect to its individual responsibilities that all reasonable procedures were followed. But that assumes that each side knows what should be its responsibility in relation to exports.
The shipment that was found to be contaminated with narcotics is not the first of its kind from Guyana. Similar busts were made in Europe in the past and there must have been others which avoided detection both from these shores at their final destination.
And this shipment is not going to be the last one that will leave these shores. There will be other attempts and therefore the authorities need to sit down and decide how best they can coordinate their efforts to ensure that these things do not happen again and what lessons need to be learnt from the present case.
Those lessons should give rise to responses but if each organization concerned decides to increase its inspection activities, we can well have a situation whereby exporters are subject to long delays and this can be detrimental to international trade.
Guyana cannot afford such delays because that will increase the cost of our exports which are already struggling to become competitive.
As such, it may be much better if resulting from the present investigation, there is improved coordination by the many inspecting agencies. Such coordination will avoid delays but more importantly will ensure that should a contaminated shipment be discovered in the future that this silly blame- game which we are present witnessing is not going to be repeated.
The time being wasted with this blame game would be better spent investigating how illegal shipments can be avoided in the future.

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