Dr. Bulkan questions the action of Minister Trotman

Dec 12, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor;
Could the Cabinet pay some attention to approved national forest policy before making an ad hoc decision which is contrary to policy? (‘Govt to redistribute fraction of lands surrendered by logging companies’, KN December 10). The Guyana Forestry Commission’s ‘forest zonation in Guyana’ plan from January 2002 plus the policy approved by the National Assembly in 1997 called for protection of environmentally important forest first, then allocation for logging. The environmental protection includes the securing of the already-logged forest from further uncontrolled logging until the forest has recovered.
The zoning plan noted that most of the production forest had already been allocated by 2002, as indeed the APNU+AFC coalition observed when it came into office in 2015.During the latter years of the PPP government, from 2008 onwards the area allocated to small-scale loggers doubled to more than two million hectares, for unsustainable logging. Minister Trotman now proposes to further increase the area for unsustainable logging, as the small-scale loggers are not investing in sawmills recommended in the national policy and the forest zonation plan. So in effect Minister Trotman is proposing the further pillage of the forests of Guyana to benefit Asian log traders.
Could Minister Trotman provide verifiable evidence that the price of wamara logs delivered in China has shown a “drastic decline”? The latest of ITTO’s fortnightly tropical timber trade marketing bulletin (volume 20 (20) 16-30 November 2016, page 18) shows wamara in the Zhangjiagang market (close to the main flooring factories) as stable at yuan 5900-6600 per tonne, the same price as it has been since at least June 2015. At current exchange rates, that is US$855-950/m3.
Note that there is almost equivalence in tonne v m3 measurements in high density timbers like wamara. Compare that price range with the values copied out by GFC from log exporters’ documents: US$160-200/m3, while the cost of delivery to a port in China is less than US$ 250/m3, using GMSA data on containerized shipping costs returning from Guyana to China. So there is a profit of US$600 or more per cubic metre even before the Chinese start sawing our logs.
Some ten years ago, the GFC had a sensible intention of zoning production forest within tractor-accessible distance in Region 10 to small-scale operators with no working capital, and allocating the more distant production forest to companies with industrial processing value-adding capacity and ability to use mobile sawmills to minimize the trucking of waste wood.
The GFC also had an intention to consolidate the better-stocked State Forest Permissions into areas for industrial-scale sustainably-managed Timber Sales Agreement concessions. That intention was abandoned in 2008 when the practice of expanding SFP area was begun, with no formal policy backing. It is not clear how the new intention of wasteful logging with no value-addition matches the President’s hopes for a Green Economy.
Janette Bulkan

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