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Underlying Causes of
Deforestation and Forest Degradation
Latin America Social Exclusion and Development
Domination Orientation: The InterGovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), which reported to the CSD in 1997, noted the critical need to understand the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, stressing that while the underlying causes are often country-specific many also operate across national boundaries, are intersectoral, and are social and economic in character. Important underlying causes noted by the IPF included:
The IPF also highlighted certain international underlying causes including:
The IPF proposed the use of a diagnostic framework, elaborated by the UNDP, to help identify the underlying causes of deforestation in any one country or region. The IPF also recommended 16 actions, in which participation, transparency and openness were stressed, which could be undertaken by national governments, international organisations and others. These included:
This case study is a contribution to this process. By examining the context of forest loss and degradation in Guyana, it illustrates those underlying causes and actions set in italics above and demonstrates their links to long-established political and economic processes of social exclusion. The case study draws substantially on a book by the author, Guyana: Fragile Frontier - loggers, miners and forest peoples, published by the World Rainforest Movement and the Latin America Bureau in 1997. The author wishes to thank all those credited in the book for their help in the original research. 1. Background: Snapshot of Guyana Guyana is a small country on the north coast of South America which gained independence from the British in 1966. With a national territory of 21.5 million hectares and an estimated population of only 750,000, the country has one of the lowest population densities of any country on the continent. Moreover, some 90% of the population live along the narrow, cultivated coastal strip, meaning that the interior of the country is even more sparsely populated, the dominant population there being the Amerindians, descendants of the country's original inhabitants, who now number some 60,000 people. The country first experienced European colonisation in the early 17th century when Dutch traders established small trading forts along the lower rivers to exchange forest products and slaves for European industrial goods. The traders struck up formal alliances with the local Amerindian nations and relied on their Amerindian partners to hold the balance of power against the neighbouring Spanish colonies being set up along the Orinoco. By supplying the Amerindians with metal tools, guns, powder and shot, the Dutch, through the Amerindian allies, were able to extend their trading infuence far into the interior of the continent and thus provide the basis for a lucrative trade with Europe. Letterwood, balsam, rare timbers and dyes - notably annatto - were the main items traded back to Europe, though the Dutch also relied on the Amerindians to provision their ships and forts and provide slaves (enslaved Amerindians) to the small settlements. As the Dutch presence became more secure and they began to establish plantations around their forts to grow coffee, cacao and sugar, the once near equal relationship between the Amerindians and the Dutch began to tip in the Europeans' favour. Investment flowed in from European banks and merchants allowing the planters to bring in African slaves and processing machinery. The plantation economy began to eclipse the forest products trade. Later, extensive areas of lowland forest and swamp were cleared and drained. The Amerindians were still valued as allies, however, to maintain the balance of power with Spain and to act as a 'bush police' to bring escaped slaves back to the plantations and put down slave rebellions (Whitehead 1988; Benjamin 1992; Menezes 1977, 1978; Daly 1975). By the mid-18th century, the three Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice were dominated by the planters who effectively controlled decision-making in the local courts and parliaments, although they were in many respects dependent on British merchants and bankers as trading partners and creditors (Daly 1975). A hierarhical, racist society developed, with white slave-owners in positions of power, Amerindians as somewhat unruly subjects in the interior and black slaves in utter subjugation on the plantations. As a result of political changes in Europe, the Dutch colonies in Guyana passed into British hands in the early 19th century although the laws and forms of the Dutch colonies continued to be respected. However, in the 1830s slavery was abolished, and the slave labour of the blacks on the plantations was gradually replaced by indentured labourers brought in from overseas, especially India (and are hence referred to as 'East Indians' in Guyana). With the ending of a role for the 'bush police', the Amerindians in the interior became increasingly irrelevant to the colonial endeavour and the traditional respect shown for the Amerindian chiefs and warriors, once essential allies, was forgotten. As the colonial power entrenched itself, British territorial claims were extended to meet the expanding claims of Venezuela and Brazil giving definition to the present boundaries (Riviere 1995; Farage 1991; Menezes 1977). From being independent nations allied through trade to the Europeans, the Amerindians had been stealthily transformed into lowly colonial subjects. Meanwhile the plantation economy continued to develop. Control of the labour force was the main concern of the planters, who used the age-old practice of divide-and-rule to maintain their dominance. As social historian Ralp Premdas (1996:46) has remarked:
The closing years of the 19th century saw important changes in the economy and social order, however. A black middle class began to emerge in urban areas, achieving advancement through education, the service sector and clerical employment. At the same time, in rural areas, East Indians began to achieve a new economic base by developing rice farms on land granted them in exchange for foregoing their return passages to India. This growing, rural peasant and middle-class expanded into cattle-farming, copra production and market gardening (LAB 1984:19-20). Meanwhile, driven mainly by technological improvements in the sugar industry which required heavy capital investment and favoured further economies of scale, the plantations became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. By 1904, four firms, all of which had their headquarters in the United Kingdom, controlled 80% of the sugar industry.(LAB 1984:23) Industrial bauxite mining by foreign companies, began in the 1920s, expanded rapidly and gradually came to match the plantation products in economic importance. The lot of the poor did not markedly improve as a result of these developments, which concentrated wealth and power in the hands of off-shore companies. Reaction to this exploitative economic order characterised the emergence of the independence movement in Guyana, which was dominated by vigorous trades unions that stood for workers' rights, the nationalisation of industries and a rapid transition to socialism. Worried by this challenge to their business interests, and in the context of the 'Cold war', Britain and the United States delayed independence until they felt comfortable about handing over power to a more pliable regime. Creating this pattern required a decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s of bloodshed, arson, murder and traumatic racial violence, in which the colonial authorities and the CIA played an active (and now admitted) role. The result was that the two main political parties emerged in Guyana with a distinctive racial character, one traditionally supportive of black interests (PNC), the other of East Indians' (PPP) (LAB 1984:30). In the event, these attempts to engineer a post-Independence government favourable to foreign business interests failed. Initially, it is true, the PNC Government did attempt to promote rapid insutrialization based on foreign investment but these efforts were a failure and incurred heavy debts. At the same time, corruption became endemic and the new Government managed to strengthen its hold on power through fraudulent elections. In 1970, the government declared that Guyana was a 'Cooperative Republic' and a programme of 'socialist' reforms was put into effect. Carried out in the name of the people, the new government-backed cooperatives were, however, dominated by ruling party allies and cronies. The government also took control of imports and exports, with the stated aim of promoting import substitution, but again the mechanism was subverted by patronage networks. At the same time, starting with the bauxite industry, over the following six years all major foreign businesses were nationalised by being bought out at an overall cost of around US$ 250 million. The move created the opportunity for a massive expansion of the bureaucracy, with yet again jobs being dispensed to party favourites. While the economy declined and corruption flourished, the situation for the poor became increasingly precarious. Food items such as milk, cheese, wheat, flour, chicken, salt, butter, split peas and coffee all became virtually unavailable to the average working-class household. The steady trickle of educated Guyanese emigrating overseas became a flood. The military and para-militaries were expanded to include nearly 1 in 35 of the population, though predominatly black, and various ill-conceived projects in hinterland development were attempted which were consumed by termites and lianas as soon as start-up funds were exhausted. In the end, the failure of the government's economic programme's led to its losing power. As the debt burden mounted, the Guyanese dollar collapsed, exports declined and the aid agencies grew increasingly tired of supporting the country. Repeated and undeniable electoral fraud, coupled with bankruptcy and defaults on debt repayments obliged the aid agencies to insist on both economic and political reforms. While economic reforms and structural adjustment were imposed, the country gradually restored press freedoms and parliamentary democracy. Privatisation was embarked on and a new economic boom began in timber and mining, as the country was once again opened to transnationals (Colchester 1997). In 1992, power passed from the PNC to the PPP and, under IMF and World Bank tutelage, the economic situation has begun to improve. The costs of this economic recovery have yet to be measured however, but are being paid in terms of environmental destruction and the further marginalization of the Amerindians. 2. Guyana's Forests: Guyana is one of the most forested countries of the tropics. Over three quarters of the national territory of 21.5 million hectares is covered in some kind of forest of which some 14 million hectares are considered to be loggable. Forest types include montane forests, seasonal moist tropical forests, wet tropical forests (rainforests), dry evergreen forests, lowland swamp forests and mangrove forests. Until the second half of the 19th century there was little exploitation of Guyana's forests due to the limitations of labour, transport, infrastructure and overseas markets. As markets developed and technologies improved logging of coastal forests and those along the banks of the lower rivers commenced but even until the 1960s extraction from interior forests was limited by the absence of roads or other means of getting timber downriver passed the major falls. This situation is now changing rapidly. Rates of deforestation in Guyana are not high compared to other parts of the Americas and are limited to the coastal forests near to settlements. Indeed the current rate of overall deforestation has been estimated at less than 0.1% per annum, although it is recognised that the statistics are weak and only very recently have new photo interpretation and satellite imagery techniques begun to be used in a concerted manner to assess the extent of forest cover and vegetational changes. However, while only two forest types appear to be at real risk of depeltion and loss - mangroves and dry evergreen forests - the degradation of the other forests of the interior is becoming a real problem. 3. Direct Causes of Deforestation and
Forest Degradation Historicaly the main cause of forest clearance in Guyana has been the expansion of plantations during the colonial era. As the European settlements based on the Amerindian trade stabilised they were gradually able to build up their plantations. Initially, the plantations were very small in scale and were established on the better drained, less fertile upland soils around the trading posts. These weaker soils favoured the cultivation of coffee and cotton, which were in fact more important than sugar until the nineteenth century. As historian Vere Daly notes, the ideal conditions for sugar cultivation were not found until towards the middle of the eighteenth century when the Demerara river was opened up and the planters of the Essequibo moved down from the lighter soils of the interior to the coastal strip (Daly 1975:55). The exploitation of the swampy lowland soils, for the most part rich alluvial clays subject to brackish water and tidal inundation, exaggerated the reliance on foreign capital and imported labour. For the development of these areas implied large expenditure on sea-defence and drainage. According to Daly, in addition to sea-defence every square mile of land prepared for sugar cultivation required forty-nine miles of drainage and sixteen miles of irrigation trenches. Thus, the 'original construction of sugar plantations in Guiana required the removal of approximately 10 million tons of earth'. A tremendous feat of effort by African slaves.(Daly 1975:73) A corresponding area was cleared of forests to make way for these estates. The cultivated coastal strip has gradually expanded east and west from its focus along the banks of the lower Demerara and Berbice through the extension of plantations, the provision of land for plantation workers laid off after completing their indentures and post-independence settlement schemes. The result has been the clearnce of forests along the coast and the creation of a narrow cultivated strip of land about 200 kilometres long and 25 kilometres deep inhabited by some 700,000 people. The remaining forests along the coasts are now under pressure from this settlement. 3.1.2. Charcoaling and fuelwood: Some 90% of the population of Guyana is, thus, concentrated along the northern coast of the country where the plantation economy developed during the colonial period. The majority of these people live in extreme poverty, a legacy of hundreds of years of exploitation as a source of cheap labour on the plantations. Many of the rural and peri-urban poor lack adequate cash incomes or access to other sources of fuel and rely on local forests for charcoal and fuelwood to supply household fuel needs. There are no detailed studies of the extent of this problem but local officials note that the pressure on coastal mangrove forests is severe. According to one set of figures some 50,000 tonnes of fuelwood are cut from the coastal forests each year, with an additional 9,000 tonnes being cut to produce 1,800 tonnes of charcoal (Amsterdam 1997). Coastal mangroves have also been seriously depleted by the construction of coastal sea defences which have been established to protect the low-lying plantations to such an extent that 'mangroves have largely disappeared where artificial sea defences and other human disturbances have occured' (Fraser 1997:25). As the mangrove forests are depleted pressure on the dry evergreen forests around the intermediate savannahs has increased correspondingly, with pressure being especially intense on two tree species, wallaba (Eperua sp.) used for firewood and dakama (Dimorphandra conjugata) used for charcoal (Amsterdam 1997). As a result 'the dry evergreen forest is at risk of disappearance in the near future' (Williams 1997:8). 3.1.3. Mining: Mining commenced in Guyana in the 1840s. Panners, using techniques refined in the gold rushes of North America, had found rich auriferous deposits in the Sierra Imataca and Upper Cuyuni, both as alluvial gold in river sands and gravels and in near-surface reefs, which were dug out by hand, pock-marking the area with small pits. By the 1880s, a boom took off and production soared and although the initially high levels of production could not been sustained once the easy deposits were worked out, the mining way of life established in the late 19th century became an integral part of the Guyana hinterland (Colchester 1997). Gold and diamond mining expanded throughout the interior during the following decades but declined somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s with the fall in gold prices. However the sector revived considerably in the 1970s as standards of living along the coast fell, gold prices rose and with the introduction of mass-produced engines and new mechanised mining techniques. Dredges with suction hoses and mechanised sluices have encouraged miners to work the beds of the rivers for both gold and diamonds. The older dredges require divers who, wearing primitive diving suits, descend to the river bed to direct the nozzles into the sediments. Some more recent machines have nozzles that can be guided from the surface. New lightweight portable engines have greatly extended the range of mining operations, with pumps providing water to mine old river terraces and water courses now far from the streams and rivers which deposited them. These so-called 'land dredges', sometimes supplied with water along hundreds of yards of plastic piping, depend on powerful hoses which flush out alluvial beds. The liquified spoil is then sucked up by pumps for processing. 'Land dredging' is a relatively new trend in Guyanese mining and, according to the World Bank, is likely to favour the emergence of larger, more highly capitalised companies which can afford the costly overheads of prospecting.(World Bank 1993a:37) By 1995, four relatively large Guyanese mining companies had emerged; Mazda Mining Ltd., which has a major mine on the Konawaruk,(Rescan 1994) Perreira Co., Correia's Holdings Limited and Alfro Alphonso. According to the Commissioner of Geology and Mines, Brian Sucre, the top ten local companies extract about 60% of the country's declared gold production (Guyana Review July 1995). Georgetown-based companies have also developed so-called 'missile-dredges', huge remote-controlled vacuum cleaners, shaped like torpedoes, mounted on river dredges, which pump water into alluvial deposits and suck them up to process the minerals. The missile-dredges can dig deep into the river banks, sometimes as far as 70 metres, liquefying mud and gravel as they go. An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 Guyanese are now involved in small-scale mining (Sanders 1995). The 14,500 small mining claims and about 800 Medium Mining Licences so far issued by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission cover over 400 miles of rivers as well as one million hectares of land and are worked by some 1,500 licensed land and river dredges and untold illegal ones (ARU nd). The proliferation of these machines has massively increased the amount of tailings left in the wake of mining. Wide areas are cleared of trees and top soil with chains-saws and hoses to allow access to the sub-soil deposits. Mercury use has increased exponentially as the gold-mining has proliferated. Flying over the mining areas, the environmental impact of mining is obvious. What were once clear rivers flowing between forested banks have become wide washes of mud and debris, criss-crossed by meandering red-brown streams of water and slurry searching for a way through the tailings, with stagnant pools and a moonscape of spoil heaps and sandbanks along the banks. Navigation has been seriously impeded in some rivers and the turbid waters have caused fish stocks to crash, seriously affecting the Amerindian diet. The Mazaruni Christian Council complains that the Upper Mazaruni 'may soon be a mud choked gutter almost cleared of fauna and flora and the rainforest at its most magnificent'.(Colchester 1991:11) Mining sites are almost never reclaimed and there is considerable concern that the abandoned pits may be producing 'acid-mine drainage' which finds its way into waters used for fishing and human consumption (Moody 1994). A study carried out for the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1990 noted the very serious consequences of mining. The report highlighted in particular that 'missile mining results in the destruction of the river banks, changes in river morphology and hydrology, greatly increases sedimentation in rivers and had profound effects on fish habitats' and recommended that the use of these dredges be prohibited. The government, however, chose not to circulate the report and missile dredges proliferated (Watkins and Woolford 1990; Cremer and Warner 1990; Colchester 1991). No comparable scientific studies have been carried out to assess the impact of this mining on the forests of the country. Large scale mines Just as in neighbouring Suriname (Colchester 1995), bauxite mining became an important addition to Guyana's economy in the 1920s. By independence, Guyana was supplying 75% of the world market in non-metallurgical bauxite from two major bauxite mines, the first run by Demerara Bauxite, a subsidiary of Alcan Aluminium, in Linden, the second by Reynolds Metals in Kwakwani. Both sites developed substantial townships around the works. The open-cast mines have resulted in extensive transformation of local ecosystems, the removal of forests and top soil, the pollution and sedimentation of waterways and serious atmospheric pollution. The overall impact of this mining on the local forests has not been the subject of an independent study however. Since the mid-1980s, Guyana has pursued a policy of encouraging further foreign investment in large-scale mining by foreign companies. Canada's Golden Star Resources began prospecting for gold in 1984 (World Bank 1993a:37), while other multinational corporations from Australia, France, Brazil, North Korea and Yugoslavia all became active in the North West District (Colchester 1991). The first major new investment in the sector started in 1989 with the establishment of Omai Gold Mines Limited, comprising Golden Star Resources Ltd. (30%) Canada's Cambior Inc. (65%) and the Guyanese Government (5%) with US$163 million of political risk insurance from the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and Canada's Export Development Corporation (MIGA 1993). The huge, open pit mine, which came on line in January 1993, immediately became one of South America's largest gold mines. With reserves of 2.6 million ounces to be extracted from an intrusive deposit of quartz-diorite in the greenstone parent rock, the company hoped annually to mine over 260,000 oz. of gold over 11 years. Using new technologies imported tax free from North America, the company has installed a large crusher mill to crunch up the rock. The gold is extracted from this rock with cyanide. After the gold is chemically removed, the cyanide-laced tailings are then diluted with water and ponded in huge clay-lined dams where the ultraviolet in sunlight and oxygen in the air are supposed to gradually eliminate the cyanide through oxidation until the waters can be safely released into the environment. The company claimed that the technology was 'tried and tested' but in fact it had never before been used under tropical rainforest conditions (Colchester 1997). The mine has resulted in the clearance of a substantial area
of forest and there have been repeated scares about the safety of the waste disposal
process. In 1995 these fears were spectacularly substantiated when the mine sufferd a
massive tailings dam burst, pouring 3 million cubic metre of cyanide-laced waste into the
country's main river. It was tragedy the country's President called a 'national
environmental disaster'. Table 1: Foreign Mining Companies Active in Guyana Golden Star Resources Ltd. Notwithstanding this evidence of the environmental hazards of large-scale mining, other companies have been encouraged to pour into the country. Large scale mining permits now cover an estimated 10% of the surface area of the country with additional much larger areas having been granted for exploration. Many of these mines and prospects are still in their first phases of development but the cumulative environmental impact of all this mining is bound to be severe. 3.1.4. Roads: The only all-weather roads in Guyana south of the coastal strip have been those leading down to the mines and, more recently, the logging concessions. The only exception is a newly opened laterite road that now connects the northern cities of Brazil to Georgetown. The first part of the road was constructed by a Brazilian mining transnational, Paranapanema, with a concessional loan of US$15 million from the Brazilian external lending agency, CACEX and the road was eventually linked up to existing mining and logging roads with funds from the Guyana government itself. National human rights and indigenous organisations, university academics, the World Bank and international environmental groups have all voiced concerns about the likely consequences of building this road, noting that the completion of the road could lead to an increasing invasion of Guyana by landless settlers, miners, timber cutters and urban squatters. Typically Amazonian towns that are connected by roads double in size in five years and continue growing. Population growth overwhelms town planning, leading to shanties on the outskirts, water shortages, sanitation problems and all the social pathologies associated with poverty and inadequate housing. In 1993, the World Bank noted that:
The road was only very recently completed and it remains to be seen to what extent these concerns were well-founded. 3.1.5. Fires: In 1998, large areas of central Guyana, especially in the intermediate savannahs were reported to be on fire during March and April, reflecting a widespread problem throughout the tropics that year. The Government of Guyana called for international assistance to fight the fires. In neighbouring Venezuela and the Roraima State in Brazil, the fires - which started in the savannah areas and on the agricultural frontiers - made deep inroads into the forests. However, no detailed study of the direct or underlying causes of the fires in Guyana has been carried out and it remains unclear what started the fires and to what extent natural forests were damaged. An interim assessment by the Guyana Forestry Commission suggests that the forests suffered surprisingly little long-term damage from the fires which mainly affected the forest understories (Clayton Hall pers. comm. 23 August 1998). Seasonal fires in the intermediate savannahs are not uncommon (Amsterdam 1997), but the unusually long and intense dry season in 1998, linked to the 'El Nino' phemomenon exacerbated the problem. 3.2 Forest Degradation 3.2.1. Logging: Logging of choice timbers for export has long been a part of Guyana's economy. The activity only grew into a significant industry in the closing years of the 19th century and until the 1950s was limited to the more accessible forests along the coast and the banks of the main rivers below the large falls. However, from the 1960s the industry began to expand and by the end of the 1980s some 2.4 million hectares of forests were under exploitation with an overall production of 94,000 cubic metres. Changes in policy in the late 1980s and 1990s allowed in tidal wave of foreign investors, mainly from South East Asia, and has resulted in the majority of the country's forests now being under concession. While the area of forest under the jurisdiction of the Guyana Forestry Commission has expanded from 9 million hectares to nearly 14 million hectares, thus encompassing nearly all the country's forests considered to be loggable, the area under concession has expanded to some 8 million hectares, with an additional area estimated at 1.8 million hectares having been handed over to foreign companies in the form of exploratory leases (Colchester 1997; GFC 1997; WRM 1997). The volume of timber being cut has increased proportionately reaching over half a million cubic metres in 1997 and projected to reach 1 million cubic metres within the next two years. Although some of the foreign investors have established downstream processing plants within the country to service the CARICOM, North Amwerican and European markets with plywood and sawnwood products, a growing proportion of the timber leaves the country in the form of raw logs while in recent years plywood production has actually begun to decline. Increasingly these log exports have been directed to the Asia Pacific region which now receives some 93% of roundwood exports. Sawnwood and plywood, on the other hand, mainly furnish markets in Latin American and the Caribbean, and North America, respectively (GFC 1997). Most independent sources agree that logging is causing severe forest degradation in Guyana. Commercial species are being exploited at far above the rate of natural regeneration and the impacts of biodiversity and soil quality are also thought to be severe. Indeed the problem of overharvesting of commercial species along the lower rivers was noted soon after the industry commenced in the late 19th century. As a British Government report noted in 1892:
Although efforts were made in the early 20th century to institute controlled forest management and a Forestry Commission was established to oversee timbering operations, the basically unsustainable nature of timber harvesting in Guyana has not been affected. A study carried out for the Guyana Natural Resources Agency by the Canadian International Development Agency concluded that logging operations in 1989 were basically unsustainable (GNRA 1989). A single species of timber, greenheart (Chlorocardium rodiei), continued right into the 1990s to provided 50% of exports, much of it from the parastatal company Demerara Woods Limited (DWL) which was boosted in the 1980s by aid packages from the World Bank and European Community (Colchester 1997). Yet studies have shown that greenheart, which constituted 94% of the timber being extracted by DWL, was regrowing at only 0.13 cubic metres per hectare per year. The company was actually harvesting timber on the assumption it would regenerate at nearly ten times this rate (Sunderland 1993). Overharvesting has also been alleged to be taking place on the huge 1.7 million hectare concession of the Barama Company Limited where the company has assumed rates of regrowth in logged over forests of 1 cubic meter per hectare per year, which cannot be justified on scientific grounds (Eden 1994; Parry and Eden 1997:99). The most detailed series of studies of the impacts of logging on forests in Guyana, carried out by the Tropenbos Foundation of the Netherlands reached similar conclusions. Loggers in Guyana are not applying careful silvicultural treatments to their forests and are assuming exaggerated rates of regrowth of exploitable species in logged over forests. Careless use of machinery, the creation of large gaps in the canopy and a focus on the very few commercial species, combined with over-intensive harvesting, may have severe environmental impacts. Short term consequences include soil compaction, faunal decline, destruction of seedlings, saplings and treelets and increased runoff, while the long term result is forests depleted of merchantable species. Unless the loggers adopt costly and intensive measures to promote the regrowth of valued species, rates of cut should be reduced by as much as two thirds, while logging cycles, presently set at 20 to 25 years should be increased to 60 or 70 years (ter Steege et al. 1996). It is doubtful if foreign companies would bother to invest in logging Guyana's forests if they were obliged to limit their harvests to these levels. Indeed, many companies already complain that their current operations are barely profitable. 3.2.2. Non-timber forest products extraction: In addition to the logging industry, Guyana has also moved to increase exploitation of non-timber forest products. In 1987, 50,000 hectares of forests in the North West District were granted in a thirty year lease to a French-owned consortium, Amazon Caribbean (Guyana) Ltd. (AMCAR) to extract hearts of the manicole palm (Euterpe oleracea), a multi-stemmed palm which grows abundantly in the coastal forests. Since setting up its canning factory in 1988, the company has been employing some 140 people in processing some 27,000 palm hearts a day, which are exported mainly to France where they sell as a luxury food item. The company relies on a floating population of mainly Amerindian cutters who work the coastal forests in canoes extracting the palm hearts and selling them, through agents who get a 10% mark up, to the company. Studies suggest that the palm-heart extraction is almost certainly not sustainable. Cutters are extracting the hearts of a much less robust species, Euterpe precatoria, which unlike the manicole palm does not regenerate from suckers and which is probably being gradually driven to local extinction by the trade. AMCAR is also operating on the assumption that the manicole palm itself can regenerate in five years but as one study carried out for the World Conservation Union's species survival commission, has concluded:
Overharvesting of palm hearts has already depleted mature stems in many areas. For example, villagers around Red Hill report supplying 10,000 to 15,000 hearts every week to AMCAR and the palm has now been exhausted (Forte 1995:28). Cutters and their families have abandoned their villages and dispersed into distant forests to seek out unexploited stands of palms (Forte 1995:50). Despite these ominous signs national production of manicole palm hearts has continued to increase reaching over 6.6 million stems in 1997 (GFC 1997). 4. Underlying Causes: Underlying these processes of deforestation and forest degradation lie a complex web of interwoven historical and current political, social and economic factors. This study highlights two major factors for more detailed examination - on the one hand, the social exclusion of the coastal poor and the Amerindians in the interior and, on the other hand, the heavy pressure exerted by foreign creditors, notably the World Bank and IMF, to carry out a rapid structural adjustment which has opened the country to transnational mining and logging ventures without first ensuring that adequate social and environmental safety nets were in place or the country had the institutional capacity to regulate these incoming industries. 4.1 Coastal Forests and the Poor: The underlying causes of the poverty of the coastal poor lie in the logic of the plantation economy, whose competiveness and profitability depended on cheap labour. Initially, the plantations relied on slave labour brought into Guyana from Africa and kept at work through harsh punishments and a plethora of restrictive laws and regulations, which gave slave owners power of life and death over their human property. The freeing of African slaves in the 1830s created an acute labour shortage for the plantations, which was overcome by a variety of means. Indentured labourers were imported in large numbers; many were Chinese until the 1860s, some were Portuguese until the 1880s, some were Africans, but above all they were 'East Indians', as they are known in Guyana, from the Indian sub-continent. Between 1851 and 1917, some 228,743 indentured East Indian labourers were brought in to Guyana to work the plantations.(LAB 1984:16) The plantocracy took many measures to ensure a malleable work-force on the estates. Alternative employment and livelihoods for freed slaves and East Indians who had worked off their obligations as indentured labourers were discouraged. Land prices were maintained at artificially high levels; a complex web of laws made it hard for blacks and East Indians to get rights in land. The domination of the government by the planters limited public expenditure on the free villages - dams, village drainage and roads were all denied support - but the public purse was generously opened to pay for the irrigation and drainage deemed necessary for the estates. Unscrupulous planters even resorted to flooding lands where smallholders were trying to establish themselves (LAB 1984). After independence development of the rural sector was impeded by racial politics and government policies which gave priority to nationalised industries and urban populations. Land laws were only slowly changed to give the poor access to land and it remains the case that most village land along the coast is technically State land leased to villagers. These measures discouraged investment and the development of productive farms. The result was that during the 1970s and 1980s standards of living actually declined in rural areas. Macroeconmic mismanagement then brought problems to both the rural and urban poor and by the end of the 1980s many of the coastal poor were reduced to subsistence (LAB 1984; Colchester 1997). Radical changes in rural development policy are required to change this situation and until this has been achieved it is hard to see how the coastal poor can avoid mining local forests for fuel. 4.2 Developing the Interior and the Social Exclusion of Amerindians: Since the 1830s, with the declining importance of the trade in forest products, the stabilisation of the western frontier with Venezuela, and the ending of the role of Amerindians as a 'bush police', the Amerindians have been marginal to Government policy and concerns. At the same time that epidemics ravaged the Amerindian villages, bringing their population down to an estimated 8,000 indiduals, Amerindians also began to be ensnared in degrading economic relations with the ranchers, balata workers, miners and loggers who began to penetrate the interior. Janette Forte, the leading anthropologist of the University of Guyana's Amerindian Reseearch Unit notes how low the Amerindians had been brought by that time:
As one colonist noted at the time:
The Amerindians were treated as historical curiosities, and groups of them with 'articles typical for their way of life' were displayed at world exhibitions and fairs (Forte 1993:5). However, in response to pressure from missionaries and humanitarian institutions, policy was changed in the early 20th century and a number of small 'reservations' were established near the coast and later in the interior, to 'protect Amerindians of comparatively pure blood'. The policy was a failure, however, as the policy was not enforced and in the 1940s, the colonial authorities adopted a different but equally parternalistic policy of 'integration' - in order 'for these people to gradually achieve Western Civilization'. Although Amerindian districts were then established to try to promote community development, through resettlement and cash-cropping schemes, the colonial Government gave priority to mining and logging and took no measures to secure the Amerindians land rights (Benjamin and Pierre 1995; Peberdy 1948; Gregory-Smith 1948; Butt Colson 1983). Only as independence approached did the British, belatedly, realise the importance for Amerindians of securing their lands and accordingly the granting of land rights to the Amerindians became a condition in the independence agreement. As a step towards fulfillment of this legal obligation an Amerindian Lands Commission was established in 1966. Over three years, the commission sought to interview all Amerindian villages, ascertain their land claims and then make proposals for a just settlement (ALC 1969). In the event, the Amerindians that the commission managed to interview made claims to 11 million hectares of land, the Commission recomended that the Amerindians be granted 6 million hectares of land. However, the Government has moved tardily to comply with its legal obligations. Since independenece, in two land settlements in 1976 and 1991, the Government has made over titles to only 1.5 million hectares. As a result of this political marginalisation, social and economic conditions in Amerindian communities are often extremely poor and in particular, Amerindian health is in a critical state. Despite a demographic recovery in many areas, malnutrition among Amerindians, especially children, is widely noted. Anaemia is very common among Amerindian women. Amerindians have the country's highest rates of respiratory tract infection and tuberculosis. The Amerindian Research Unit of the University of Guyana considers that the malaria situation is so bad in Amerindian areas that it requires 'a national emergency response'. It is estimated that about a third of Amerindians carry malaria (Forte 1993:7). The Unit reports that venereal diseases including AIDS are also growing at disproportionate speed among Amerindians (ARU nd). Amerindians also have the country's lowest levels of formal education, with the smallest proportion going to secondary and higher level grades (ARU nd). The social exclusion of Amerindians by the Government and the aid agencies has been a major factor encouraging policies of internal colonialism - the logging and mining of the interior. The absence of secure Amerindian land rights, alternative development policies and the lack of strong institutions managing interior resources in favour of the resident populations, has provided a policy vacuum that the extractive industries have been able to occupy with relative impunity. It is a situation the Amerindians have strongly objected to. They have repeatedly demanded land rights, a decisive voice in developing policy in the interior and full consultation before logging, mining or other activities are permitted in their territories. Despite repeated Government reassurances and promises to deliver all these things, no practical changes have resulted. Complains one spokesperson for an Amerindian community in the Uper Mazaruni:
As one Amerindian who lives on untitled lands within the Barama company's logging concession noted bitterly: 'so we just live on their concessions now. We're like refugees. We have no place'. Another told me:
In Guyana today, a plethora of, mainly foreign, companies have control over 3 million hectares of mining permits and something over 9 million hectares of logging concessions, while the Amerindians who have occupied these lands since time immemorial have rights to less than 800,000 hectares. The Government continues to deny their rights to land. 4.3 Development Domination At independence, Guyana inherited an economy almost wholly dependent on exports of primary commodities - mainly bauxite, sugar and rice, supplemented by minerals and some specialist timbers. The industries producing these goods were largely owned by foreign, mainly British and American companies, whose influence over the colonial state had been paramount. Prior to independence British and American foreign policy towards Guiana was aimed primarily at protecting these interests and thus resisting what they saw as dangerous left-wing or 'communist' efforts to expropriate foreign-owned businesses. However, as noted, these efforts were ineffective and did not long delay the nationalisation of foreign-dominated industries. The judgement of the international aid agencies of the experiment in so-called 'Cooperative Socialism' has been severe. The policies of nationalising key sectors of the economy, they conclude, all but destroyed private sector initiative and created a very unfavourable environment for foreign investment. After the oil price hike of 1973 and the collapse of world prices for basic commodities like sugar and bauxite, the economy moved heavily into arrears. Between 1980 and 1988, the real gross domestic product continually declined at nearly 3% per annum (World Bank 1993b:3) Yet inefficiencies in management and a political reluctance to support sectors dominated by Indo-Guyanese meant that, even where markets were available, supply was unable to meet demand. Sugar and bauxite production declined throughout the late 1970s and 1980s and the industries ran up huge deficits while continuing to function with ill-serviced and decaying old machinery. Public infrastructures - telecommunications, electricity services, water supply, roads, railways, canals and drainage systems - fell into disrepair. The country only remained afloat due to massive borrowing, and by 1989 the national debt had climbed to 600% of the GDP whereas output had declined to 68% of the 1976 figure (World Bank 1993b). By the early 1980s, the Government began to default on debt repayments and it became clear to all but the most dogmatic that the country could not survive as an export-dependent economy without radical changes. The experiment in 'Cooperative Socialism' had failed. The IMF/World Bank prescription to deal with this chronic problem was, of course, structural adjustment, which means, essentially, a cut back on government spending coupled with a promotion of foreign-exchange-generating exports. The preferred approach of the development agencies was to re-open the country to foreign capital. However because this promotion of foreign investment implied increasing foreign control of the economy, it was a policy that the Government of Guyana for a long time resisted. Alternative means of reviving the flagging economy were instead attempted by the aid agencies short of the full-blown reforms preferred by the development banks. Thus, in line with national policy, the first IMF Stand-By Arrangement to bail out the economy was negotiated in 1978 and the World Bank pushed through a Programme Loan the following year. The main aim of the Bank's loan was to promote exports through public sector investments. Additional monies were provided to promote exports of greenheart from the State-owned timber company, Demerara Woods. The aid programme was, however, a failure. Exports continued to decline. By the early 1980s, therefore, the Bank began to push more assertively for structural reforms in public sector spending. A second Programme loan was redesigned - as the Bank later admitted with inadequate preparation and consequently little real government support - and became one of the World Bank's first 'Structural Adjustment Loans'. The sum involved was boosted from the US$ 10 million initially proposed to US$ 22 million. Emphasis was placed on devaluing the currency and laying off 'excess' public sector state employees. The problem remained, however, that cutting back expenditure did little to address the country's underlying problem of stagnant production, which resulted from 80% of the economy being under state control. For that an alternative strategy had to be sought (Hogg 1993:134-5). The IMF/World Bank formula, as elsewhere, was to link reductions in public sector spending with a revitalization of export-oriented production by the private sector. This would require basic policy changes from the government, the privatization of some State assets and the creation of a fiscal climate that would attract otherwise nervous foreign investors. This aspect of the Bank's hastily laid Structural Adjustment Loan was also a failure exactly because the Government would not countenance such a reversal of policy (Hogg 1993:136). An internal IMF memorandum of 1982 noted that:
As a result of this fundamental disagreement with the whole thrust of structural adjustment reform, the IMF formally terminated its support, the World Bank suspended the second tranche of its Structural Adjustment Loan and other foreign donors, notably the InterAmerican Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank, began to scale back their aid. Starved of balance of payments support, the economy spiralled into further decline. By 1985 the country was effectively bankrupt and was massively in arrears on its debt repayments. The death of the Guyanese President in August 1985, however, freed the country of its ideological straitjacket and paved the way for Government policies more amenable to IMF/World Bank prescriptions. A new President was secured in office by another fraudulent election. Privatization of the economy began to be talked about again but given the continuing depressed market in bauxite and sugar, the investment banks had to look elsewhere for means to promote foreign exchange earnings. As early as 1986, the World Bank began to argue that Guyana's future economic expansion depended on an increase in natural resource exports and that same year the Government set up the Guyana Natural Resource Agency in order to promote investment in natural resource-based industries (Hogg 1993:138). According to the World Bank's 'Proposal for Economic Recovery':
As the following sections explore, efforts to boost foreign investment in logging and mining soon began in earnest but while foreign mining companies began to be invited in, on relatively attractive terms, from the mid-1980s onwards, logging remained essentially a Guyanese and public sector enterprise until 1989. By 1986, the Government's expressed commitment to structural adjustment and liberalization laid the grounds for a rapprochement with the IMF, which was an essential pre-requisite for any renegotiation of the country's massive debt with the other donors. Negotiations with the IMF commenced in April the same year and a major joint IMF/World Bank mission visited the country in early 1987 to hammer out an agreed policy for reform. Development assistance aimed at providing balance of payments support once more became possible. What emerged from the two years of negotiations with the IMF and World Bank was a three year 'Economic Recovery Program' under the direct supervision of the IMF. Launched in mid-1988, the programme had three principal goals: to encourage free markets in goods and services, by creating a suitable environment for private, especially foreign, investment; to reduce the size of the public sector; and to restore good relations with the main donor countries and agencies. To kick-start the process, the Government announced a new Investment Code in July 1988, which as Hogg (1993:139) notes is regarded as one of the most liberal in South America. It also laid the basis for the privatisation of State-owned enterprises. The extent to which 'Cooperative Socialism' had been rejected in favour of development based on foreign investment - in line with World Bank and IMF prescriptions - could not be more marked. Setting out its investment policy in 1988, the Government noted:
The new policy began to bear fruit. In 1989, a large part of the country's foreign debt was rescheduled and a major proportion of bilateral debts were forgiven. The same year the Government moved to reform the exchange control structure with the aim of legalising the parallel markets that had emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile the World Bank continued to push new exports. Apart from the considerable programme aid provided through its structural adjustment loans, in 1990, the Bank also lent the Government new 'special drawing rights' through its soft loan facility, the International Development Agency, explicitly linked to the 'development and expansion of non-traditional sectors (gold, forestry and manufacturing)' (Hogg 1993:141). But the transition from 'Cooperative Socialism' to the World Bank's vision of 'sustained growth' led by fiscal probity and foreign direct investment was not an easy one. Devaluation and the removal of price controls on all but a small number of basic commodities brought further hardship to Guyanese citizens, which were only partly offset by a hastily patched together social 'safety net' - the Social Impact Amelioration Programme (SIMAP) - which was severely hampered by a lack of institutional capacity to deliver promised services to affected groups. Cut backs in Government spending, the decline of real earnings resulting from inflation and devaluation, and public sector lay-offs hit the poor hard. Real wages in the public sector fell by 18% compared to 1986. Government investment in infrastructure actually declined: the road system deteriorated, the sea-wall protecting the coastal agriculture from flooding was breached in several places and sewerage and water supply systems collapsed. Public spending on the health sector was half what it had been in 1984 and education spending fell to a third of what it had been before adjustment. The result was considerable disaffection. Strikes increased and were partly responsible for the fact that, in 1990, GDP actually declined by 3.2% (World Bank 1993b). Nevertheless, the Government persevered, accompanying its economic reforms with political liberalisation. By 1993, the World Bank was holding up Guyana as a shining example of courageous and far reaching reform. 'Few countries', the World Bank noted proudly 'have moved so far, so fast'. Within four years the Government had eliminated almost all price controls, established a floating exchange rate for the Guyanese dollar, eliminated import licensing, reduced import tariffs, launched a major program of privatisation of State assets, introduced private sector management of the sugar industry, reduced the numbers working for the Government and raised taxes. GDP began to increase markedly from 1991 onwards and a galloping inflation rate was gradually brought under control. Arrears on debt repayments were eliminated and bilateral debts forgiven or rescheduled, though repayments were still acounting for over 50% of foreign exchange earnings (World Bank 1993b). 4.4 Economic Liberalization and the Mining Boom: Given the anarchy and destructiveness of the small-scale mining sector, many aid agency officials have suggested that the best means of getting control of the mining industry was to promote large-scale mining by big companies. Economies of scale, they long argued, allow mining to be subjected to more onerous regulations and more easily monitored and supervised. The argument is convenient in that it coincides with the same agencies' macro-economic prescriptions for structural adjustment, trade liberalization, the promotion of 'non-traditional exports', including gold and diamonds, and 'foreign direct investment'. Whereas the small-scale mining is open to 'all' - a small 'land dredge' operation costs about US$2,000 to set up and even a large river dredge costs around US$5,000 to US$10,000 - large-scale mines require investors prepared to hazard millions of dollars on costly prospecting, before mining can even begin. Only well-capitalised foreign companies can compete in such a field. Following the nationalisation of the mining industries in the 1970s, the return of foreign interest in the mining sector only restarted in the mid-1980s when the PNC government, under pressure from the international financial institutions, began to relax conditions for foreign capital. Until that date the regulations had required any foreign company to enter into a joint agreement granting the Government a majority equity share in the exploitation of any large concessions - as a result no large ventures were initiated (World Bank 1993b:44). The mid-1980s thus saw a change in policy, allowing foreign mining companies a majority stake in their operations, and a number of ventures got under way. While small-scale and medium-scale mining remains closed to foreign interests, large-scale mines are now open to foreign companies who can negotiate one-off 'mining agreements' with the Government through the Office of the President and the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, with the help of the Guyana Natural Resources Agency which was established with World Bank assistance in 1986 to promote private sector investment in logging and mining. Each deal so struck defines the fiscal incentives to be offered: which taxes may be waived, for how long, the percentage on profits payable as royalties and so on. Questions have been raised at the wisdom of this arrangement. Instead of having a standard regime for all foreign investors in the sector, the process of negotiating separate 'mining agreements' with each company encourages a lack of transparency, favouritism, cronyism and corruption, which as the World Bank has noted are already problems in the GGMC. Famously invisible too are the Environmental Impact Assessments required of all foreign companies, which are nowhere available to inspection by the Guyanese public. Notwithstanding these difficulties, and notwithstanding the fickle nature of the gold market, the World Bank and many other financial advisers have heavily promoted expansion of the mining sector as one of the key ways of developing Guyana's exports. A stream of consultants have poured through Georgetown to join the chorus of siren voices urging Guyana to go for gold. For example, according to a Colorado School of Mines study in 1994 'Guyana has the potential to become one of the most attractive mining countries in five years'. To achieve this, said the report, the Government should 'deregulate the mining sector' over the next 18 months, 'restructure the current legal and fiscal framework for mining, highlighting the role of foreign capital', and 'launch a world-wide campaign to draw attention to the new mining opportunities for potential investors...'. The reason for haste, the report noted, is that 'Guyana is one of forty mineral-producing countries actively competing for investment dollars and has little time to delay the launching of its mineral development policy'. Continued the report:
4.5 Structural Adjustment in the Forests: The policy of economic liberalisation adopted by the Hoyte Government in 1986 and pushed through by the World Bank and IMF as a full-blown structural adjustment programme, radically changed the context in which the timber industry could develop. A plan for the development of the forestry sector was called for, part of a global effort by the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to promote tropical forestry (Colchester and Lohmann 1990). The task was taken on by the Canadian International Development Agency, which prepared a 'National Forestry Action Plan' within a few months. It received Government endorsement in late 1989 (NFAP 1989). The CIDA study found that annual timber exports were limited to only 94,000 cubic metres and that only some 2.4 million hectares of the 9.1 million hectares legally classified as State Forests were under production. However, even this limited level of production was considered to be unsustainable because of poor forestry practice, while the capacity of the Guyana Forestry Commission to regulate the industry was, it found, negligible. Notwithstanding, the plan advocated a rapid increase of logging up to a maximum of 3.6 million hectares, through the provision of quick-disbursing loans. Up to 62% of the US$ 90 million budget proposed for the expansion was to be allocated to increasing production, while up to US $ 23 million was to be spent on expanding the forestry service to control the logging. To adequately monitor logging in the expanded area, the plan recommended that the number of trained forestry staff be increased from 5 to 76 persons (NFAP 1989). The World Rainforest Movement was quick to condemn the plan as folly, noting the destructive consequences of a similar experiment in Ghana where the rapidly expanding private sector had run ahead of government capacity to regulate the rovate sector (Colchester and Lohmann 1990). However, ignoring such words of caution, the Guyanese Government took decisive steps to follow the aid agencies' prescriptions. As part of its programme of privatisation, in 1989, the state-owned company Guyana Timbers, which had been running at a considerable loss, was sold to the Colonial Life Insurance Company (CLICO) of Trinidad for a knock-down US$ 2.7 million. The company was incorporated locally as Caribbean Resources Limited and gained assured access to 320,000 hectares of forests. Guyana, however, assumed Guyana Timbers' debts. Two years later, another parastatal, Demerara Woods Ltd., was sold off to British and Dutch financiers, with expanded rights to log over half a million hectares of forests. Even more ambitious deals soon followed. In 1991, the Government granted a massive concession to a Malaysian/Korean consortium, the Barama Company Ltd., on extraordinarily generous terms. The Barama agreement grants the company, which is 80% owned by Malaysia's Samling Timbers Bhd. and 20% by the Korean conglomerate Sun Kyong, a 25 year license - automatically extendable for a further 25 years - to exploit some 1.69 million hectares of forests in the North West of the country for the export of raw logs, sawn lumber, veneer and processed plywood. The company expects to export some 300,000 cubic metres of timber in the early years, rising to 1.2 million cubic metres per year after ten years. The company also enjoys a ten year tax holiday, including income tax, corporation tax, withholding tax, consumption tax, property tax and income duties on just about everything - including machinery, fuel, building materials, office equipment and medical supplies. Export taxes will only be payable on greenheart, while even royalty payments have been fixed in Guyanese dollars over the first twenty year period - a gift to the company as the currency soon devalued. Yet the company is also permitted to hold external accounts, foreign currency accounts within Guyana, employ 15% foreign workers - more if local labour with the right skills is unavailable - and have disagreements with the Government subject to the arbitration of the 'International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes' in Washington DC, in which case the company 'shall be deemed as a national of a State other than Guyana' (Basic Agreement 1991: article 21). The Barama agreement had been negotiated with the head of the Guyana Natural Resources Agency. Allegations that he or other officials had improperly benefited from the deal were never substantiated, but after the change of governments, the same individual took up a consultancy with the company. The close association between South East Asian timber companies and senior Government officials continued after the change of Government. In December 1993, funded by the Barama Company Limited, the President of Guyana made a special tour of the capitals of South-East Asia, China and Japan to encourage yet further 'Foreign Direct Investment' and 'South-South Cooperation'. The results soon became apparent as a raft of other Asian logging companies sought out lucrative logging deals in the country, including Leeling Timber Group of Malaysia, the Hyundai Wood Company Limited of South Korea, Berjaya Sdn. Bhd. of Malaysia, Forest Marketing Services of Singapore, the Prime Group of Singapore, Solid Timbers Sendirian Berhad of Malaysia and Kwitaro Investments Ltd. of Malaysia. The trend set in motion by the World Bank and IMF's structural adjustment reforms has thus resulted in foreign transnationals having control over the majority of the forests of the country but the economic returns to Guyana have not been assured. A belated study carried out for the World Bank in late 1995 showed that loggers were getting their timber in Guyana extraordinarily cheap. The study revealed that the royalties, taxes and forest fees being paid by loggers in Guyana were some of the lowest in the tropics, being less than a tenth of those paid in most African and Asian countries. Moreover, since 1988 fees had been falling in real terms. Royalty rates were at 30% of their former value, while customs duties and acreage fees had fallen by more than 90% in the past decade. On top of this, the report stated, foreign companies enjoyed 'generous tax breaks and other incentives creating conditions of unfair competition (for local producers)'. As a result Guyana has been liquidating its forest assets for little national gain. Warns the report:
A study by the World Resources Institute reached similar conclusions. According to the study Government income from logging activities in 1995 totalled less than US$ 1 million and concluded that 'the promise of large future earnings from invesments in logging may be little more than fantasy' (Sizer 1996:3). 4.6 Weak institutional capacity The relatively weak capacity of Guyanese Government institutions not only meant that they have been unable to leverage adequate financial returns to the exchequer from foreign investors, they have also been unable to monitor and regulate the environmental and social performance of the expanding logging and mining operations. For example, when the massive logging boom got underway in the early 1990s, the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) employed only five trained foresters, none of whom were engegd in monitoring forest management and its forest rangers worked only to count logs as they left the concessions in order to assess royalties, and had no role or training to assess compliance with forest management regulations. Authority to hand out logging concessions was vested in a small, barely accountable government office directly under Presidential control, providing opportunities for favoritism and malpractice to abound. For this reason, timber deals were rarely transparent. As the World Bank was to note 'most pertinent information on how the Forestry Commission deals with individual timber operators is regarded as confidential and is not publicly available' (Stabroek News 29 October 1993). During the early 1990s, obscurity about the operations of the Forestry Commission increased. The (expatriate) Commissioner for Forests resigned and was not replaced. The Commission began to be effectively run by the Chairman of the Board, who happened to be the President's brother-in-law. Beyond his brief, and without even the Deputy Commissioner's knowledge, he was single-handedly negotiating logging concessions with foreign companies. The World Bank concluded that the Guyanese Forestry Commission was an example of the 'capture theory of regulation', whereby the regulatory body is controlled by the industry it is supposed to regulate (Stabroek News 29 October 1993). The same institutional weaknesses were also observed in the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC). One problem is that not only does the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission lack the biologists, toxicologists and laboratories needed to carry out a proper study of these environmental problems, but that there are no proper regulations to control the environmental impacts of mining anyway (World Bank 1993a:41). Indeed even the regulations regarding filing claims, staking out concessions, declaring finds and paying royalties are regularly evaded. In 1993, the World Bank estimated that as much as three quarters of gold production is undeclared. Noted the Bank: 'Most producers under-report their production to avoid payment of royalties and taxes, and because of practical difficulties attached to selling gold legally in Georgetown' (World Bank 1993a:35). Quite simply, the Commission lacks the staff and resources required to monitor adequately what is happening in the interior: consequently most mining is unregulated and unsupervised. Indeed in the early 1990s the technical capabilities of the GGMC deteriorated. Noted the World Bank:
The Commissioner of Geology and Mines admitted the scale of the problem: 'Twenty to fifteen years ago there were 1,000 claims, today we have 12,000 and the Commission has not yet caught up with the industry' (Stabroek Review 2 August 1995). The headwater mining camps, in particular, are almost completely beyond government control. According to the Amerindians, mines officers are rarely able to visit their settlements and as a result no regulations are enforced. Even when mines officers do visit, their inspections are often perfunctory. As the Akawaio community of Jawalla noted in a presentation to a national Amerindian conference in 1994:
For half a decade after the structural adjustment was launched, it fell to a handful national and international NGOs to speak out against the craziness of a national development policy that allowed foreign companies to profit from exploiting Guyana's interior when the Government could barely document, let alone regulate or control, what was going on. Thus NGOs and Amerindian organisations called: for EIAs to be carried out before roads were built; for a moratorium on handing out logging concessions; for new regulations to control mining; for the prior recognition of Amerindian rights: and which warned of the risks of tailings dams breaking. Thanks to their concerted action, and the reporting of these concerns in the national and international press, the aid agencies, belatedly, began to pay attention. Five years after launching its structural adjustment programme, the World Bank began to admit the need to strengthen the institutional capacity of the GGMC and GFC. It insited on an EIA being carried out on the Brazil-Georgetown road before it was completed. Jointly with the InterAmerican Development Bank it commenced an Environmental Management Project, which provided for the passing of an Environmental Protection Act and the setting up of an Environment Protection Agency to oversee it. Heeding NGO demands, Britain's Department for International Development insisted that a condition for its Forestry Support Project, aimed at reforming the Guyana Forestry Commission, was that the Government impose a moratorium on the hand out of logging concessions. These and other measures have belatedly begun to ensure that the environmental impacts of the structural adjustment are, ate least re-examined, and that Guyana begins to secure a better returns from the exploitatioon of its resources. However, two key problems remain - the government's refusal to recognise Amerindian land rights and the still unregulated nature of mining. 6. Conclusions and Recommendations 6.1. Summary Guyana is experiencing a rapid degradation of its forests due to poorly regulated logging. Already the majority of the country's accessible forests have been handed out as concessions mainly to foreign logging companies. While deforestation is not yet extensive, significant loss is being caused by fuelwood gathering, charcoal burning, mining, road-building and, to an unknown extent, forest fires. There are concerns that cross-border migration along a newly opened road from Brazil could initiate forest loss by migrant farmers but this is not yet a problem. A complex web of historical and contemporary social and economic forces underlie these problems. The historical and continuing domination of the economy by trade interests and transnational corporations has resulted in a society divided by race and class. Amerindians and ex-plantation workers have suffered social exclusion, while a unaccountable, corrupt and manipulative political elite has established itself in power. Lack of transparency and the absence of strong civil society institutions has allowed decisions to be made with regard to natural resources that favour these transnationals and the political elite at the expense of excluded social sectors and the environment. During the years of one-party rule the economy was chronically mismanaged resulting in a massive debt burden and a growing dependency on foreign aid. Aid agency prescriptions to redress the balance of payments crisis through structural adjustment and a liberalisation of the economy have encouraged an astoundingly rapid escalation of logging and mining. These activites are resulting in widespread deforestarion and forest degradation. Although the government and the aid agencies have taken some measures to strengthen the state regulatory institutions that control logging and, to a lesser extent, mining, these have been too little, too late. Only since the mid-1990s have the IMF and World Bank begun to give much attention to the need to build up the capacity of the GFC and GGMC and develop new environmental standards. Even so, the aid agencies have been reluctant to confront the entrenched problem of social exclusion and only intense advocacy by NGOs has obliged, for example, the British Department for International Development to push for changes in forest policy to favour Amerindian interests. The Government's reluctance to recognise Amerindian land rights remains a major obstacle to progressive reforms. 6.2. Recommendations Solutions to all these problems and the major underlying causes have long been advocated by NGOs and by Amerindian organisations. The following should be discussed at the regional workshop in Santiago: International Financial Institutions and aid agencies Lessening 'Development Domination':
National reforms Combating social exclusion:
Combating Corruption and Mismanagement:
Regulating transationals:
References: ALC Amsterdam, Denise ARU ARU ARU ARU Benjamin, Anna Benjamin, Anna and Laureen Pierre Butt Colson, Audrey Colchester, Marcus Colchester, Marcus and Larry Lohmann Colchester, Marcus and Larry Lohmann (editors) Cremer and Warner Daly, Vere T. Eden, Michael J. Farage, Nadia Flaming, Lorene Forte, Janette Forte, Janette (editor) Fraser, Denise GFC Hogg, Dominic Johnson, Dennis V. LAB Menezes, M.N. Menezes, M.N. (Ed.) NFAP Pang, Eul-Soo Parry, John T. and Michael J. Eden Peberdy, A. Premdas, Ralph Rivière, Peter Sanders, Douglas Sassoon, Meredith Sizer, Nigel ter Steege, Hans et al. Sunderland, T.C.H. Walcott, George et al. Watkin, E.M. and Woolford, G.W. Whitehead, Neil L. Williams, Patrick E. World Bank |
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