KACIKE: Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology
KACIKE: Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology
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This article has been reproduced with the kind
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The citation information for the original article is: The pagination from the original source has been preserved below. Research in tropical rain forests: Its challenges for the future – p. 139 LAND-USE PLANNING AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT Ms. Janette Forte Amerindian Research Unit, University of Guyana 1. AMERINDIAN RESEARCH
PROJECTS IN NORTH-WESTERN GUYANA The studies going on in this area under the framework of the Tropenbos-Guyana programme are those led by Tinde van Andel, Marileen Reinders, and myself. Tinde van Andel’s research objective is to quantify the use of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) in a particular geographical area of North-Western Guyana. Marileen Reinders is concerned with the indigenous use of forest resources in the same location from a more anthropological perspective. My interest is in the effect that resource extraction activities (including forestry) for non-indigenous markets, has on the ways of life of forest-dwelling people. Each of these separate research projects benefits from our sharing of logistics and information, and we plan on a joint seminar in due course. Also sharing Tropenbos sponsorship, we are guided in our individual academic objectives by the insights that our findings can offer to the larger Tropenbos programme in Tropical Forestry. Now to outline some of the results achieved and anticipated from this research in progress. Tinde van Andel’s work on NTFPs has occupied two extended stays in the village of Kariako, and she has now moved to a comparative site in Santa Rosa, both in the North-West District of Guyana. She and her team have catalogued a total of 414 plant species used by the inhabitants of Kariako, of which 71 are cultivated species and 343 are species collected from the wild. Species yielding NTFPs are found in all forest types: Mora forest, swamp forest, mixed forest, secondary forest, secondary shrub land, and open grassy vegetation. Of these 343 wild plants, some 626 different uses were registered. Food, medicine, and construction are the most important categories of NTFPs, and most cultivated plants are food plants. Most of the uses are derived from wood (35%), followed by fruits (19%), leaves (11%), and bark (10%). More than half of this wood is used as fuel, but where firewood is excluded, fruits represent the largest group of forest products. This research includes a detailed study of the impact of harvesting the manicole palm, Euterpe oleracea, in distinct rivers and areas of the North-West District. It may also lead to an expansion of the Karinya lexicon by cataloguing Karinya words used in natural history through a collaboration initiated with Professor Berend Hoff of Leiden University. Though the project is still on-going, some The Tropenbos Foundation, Wageningen, the Netherlands – p. 140 results have already been written up in articles on the ethnobotany of the Barama River Karinya and commercially harvested NTFPs in the North-West District, and in a paper presented at the 1997 Congress of Americanists in Quito, Ecuador. Marileen Reinders’s project centres on the use of natural resources by the households of Kariako village and the different strategies followed according to family situation or choices made, thereby highlighting the diversity in resource use within one community. She began her research by taking a census of this Karinya community, followed by the selection and training of 16 families in keeping daily records of resource use, the techniques used, and the areas of exploitation. After native fieldwork assistants had been trained, the main work proceeded with the measurement of cultivated fields along transects through first-crop cultivated fields, in order to record the quantities of cultivated plants and the varieties found in the fields, and the quantities and types of weeds occurring in fields cut from primary and secondary forest. Cultivation is being given more in-depth attention since it is the most important and essential activity for the Barama Karinya. This project also includes an on-going collaboration with the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), Guyana, and the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, Colombia (CIAT), in propagating and testing 32 distinct cultivars of Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz). Tubers have been tested for starch and cyanide content and examined for insect invasion and root damage. Farmers are interviewed about the reasons for preferring certain cultivars, their origin and the advantages or disadvantages of others, and the difficulties they encounter in their farming efforts. Another part of the research has been measuring the impact of increased involvement in gold mining on traditional subsistence activities among the Barama River Karinya. My own study focuses on the adaptive strategies evolved by the Karinya in the rain forests of the upper Cuyuni-Barama-Barima watershed. These Karinya continue to be largely nomadic and very little is known of their numbers, location, and ways of life. My fieldwork started in August 1997 with an initial reconnaissance in the Matthews Ridge/Baramita area. There, I walked to eight separate locations where Karinya have settled, generally in small groups composed of a few extended families. With the exception of the Baramita area, all the Karinya settlements are located within the area now being logged by the Barama Company Limited (BCL), a large Asian multinational. There, I began the ethnographic survey that will occupy the next phase of my fieldwork in 1998. My initial observations are that in spite of having endured a century of invasion by coastlander and foreign miners in their territory, and in spite of their own purposive involvement in gold mining, the Karinya remain a forest people, dependent on an intact ecosystem for most of their subsistence needs. The Karinya, however, are the least well organised of all the Amerindian peoples of Guyana, lacking the minimal social organisation and structure necessary for them to deal with the many new resource extraction companies now working in their territory. With the exception of Baramita, all their settlements lack land titles. The communities are small and highly migratory, generally following gold strikes until their workings are encroached on by more organised miners from outside the area. The Karinya avoid too close an association with outsiders, and will easily move when their territory is invaded by industry in the form of timber roads. These Karinya lack the most basic documentation of their existence as Guyanese citizens. Lacking immunisation cards and birth certificates, children are denied entry into schools, even if their parents are willing and able to pay for them to attend one of the few schools in the region. Illiteracy is widespread and many Karinya are heavily involved in mining and its attendant vices: alcoholism, use of hard drugs, prostitution of women, and a high level of physical violence. I have since discussed some of these initial findings with key officials of the Ministries of Health, Education, Labour, and Social Services, and at their instigation have written up a proposal to carry out a social services baseline data Research in tropical rain forests: Its challenges for the future – p. 141 project in order to aid official planning for health and education interventions in the area. It has the promise too of providing basic demographic data that are lacking though vital to any kind of planning: for instance, we have no definitive figures of Karinya population as a percentage of the total. It may be necessary to underline the relevance of this kind of ethnographic work to a forestry research programme. Any new or continuing exploitation of forest resources will have an effect on the inhabitants of the resource area. The North-West of Guyana is home to a people who have had a long history of degradation by contact with resource extraction incursions, starting with gold in the 1880s and recently with timber on a massive scale. Research aimed at the sustainable management of the biological capital must take into account the effects on the human population - past, present, and projected. Following the initial ESIA carried out in the area by ECTF in 1993, there has been no systematic follow-up by BCL, or by the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC), or anyone else. Nevertheless, from reports over the last several years and from direct observation on my recent fieldwork, I have been able to make some notes on the impacts of the BCL logging operations on the Karinya within the Matthews Ridge part of the concession: Roads have been cut through some farms in the lower Paru area, Big Creek, and Arawatta. Local people had never been informed of the road-making plans of the Company, and, of course, compensation has never been paid. The most typical Karinya response was to move away, generally to the Baramita area, which had prior land title and was excised from the BCL concession. The road-making has many localised impacts: the two major complaints I heard were the blocking up of forest walking lines and the sullying of drinking water. In one instance, a BCL team simply left a large Aromata log (a poisonous tree species) across a tributary of the Paru, causing all the water downstream to be unfit for drinking. But with no established channels of communication with the Company, the Karinya have no way of making their problems heard. Fishermen in Big Creek area say that fish had become scarce as a result of the blocking up of their small creeks. In their own words, they are forced to do more gold mining since subsistence activities are no longer viable. The road construction is striking in its contrast with the surrounding vegetation. To the non- forester, it seems to merit technical study of the silvicultural effect of a linear gap over 50 metres wide, from which even the topsoil is removed, running for many miles through primary forest. In a number of settlements, men complain that the road-building has scared away small game and increased the presence of jaguars (large neotropical cats) around their settlements. The dangerous large cats are said to stalk the timber roads. People are forced to use the new logging trails since their accustomed walking paths are blocked up. This means walking in the hot sun, with no watering places on the way. At the same time, BCL vehicle drivers are forbidden to give lifts to non-BCL persons. While no records seem to be kept by any local Guyanese officials of the numbers, job descriptions, etc., of the influx of foreigners into this remote section of the country, the social transformations of the area are on-going. At the same time, it can be noted that BCL, and other multinational companies, demonstrate a strong interest in NTFPs, systematically purchasing several types of wood gums, snakes, scorpions, and other items. No authority is taking any close interest in the activities of a substantial colony of expatriate timber and mining workers, but ultimately there is an accumulation of these direct social effects which, I would venture to submit, are within the proper ambit of forestry development issues. The Tropenbos Foundation, Wageningen, the Netherlands – p. 142 I have spent perhaps too long describing the kind of data with which my research is concerned, but the description itself will indicate the gaps in research and the priorities for further research in the case study, to which I should, according to the seminar guidelines, devote six minutes. There is another striking gap in the research which I will elaborate below, but to finish the oral presentation, I have to mention the linkages between our research into these social aspects of Sustainable Forest Management and biodiversity. To do this is to re-state the obvious. Forestry as an economic pursuit is about using natural resources for human benefit. The way the resources are exploited will have impacts on local populations. Large-scale forestry is driven by cash profit: concerns of sustainability are about sustaining the profit over a long, ideally indefinite, period. How and where that profit is applied to human benefit is a matter of global justice, but that is a social aspect well beyond our reach today. The linkage with biodiversity is clear. Forest use by and for populations larger than those who traditionally occupied the forests - in an equilibrium state between harvesting and natural regeneration of plant and animal consumption goods - inevitably has an impact on the possibility of making a living from the forest in the traditional way. The extent to which the harvest can be increased, before natural (or stimulated) regeneration fails to maintain equilibrium, has been shown to depend crucially on the level of biodiversity supporting the natural production processes. It is important therefore to learn about the state of biodiversity in areas coming under extraction pressure. In the North-West of Guyana, a site of human habitation for perhaps nine thousand years, it is useful to approach biodiversity research through the knowledge of the local inhabitants. It is the local people who can contribute to formal knowledge on how forestry activities affect biodiversity. It is the local people whose lives are directly affected when forest exploitation turns out to be not only unsustainable, but even, as we have to say now, unmanageable.
2. THE FORESTRY REGIME IN
GUYANA However, as has also been pointed out in a number of recent studies (Bishop, 1996; Colchester, 1997, Government of Guyana and UNDP, 1997; Government of Guyana, 1996; Sizer, 1996), the very plethora of agencies and overlapping jurisdictions, coupled with the lack of enforcement capacity, hopelessly confound what provisions exist on paper for regulating forestry at all, never mind sustainable forest management. The institutions that were set up in colonial times to monitor resource extraction industries (the Geology and Mines Commission, the Forestry Commission, and the Lands and Surveys Department) were all autonomous, vertical, parallel organisations, dealing with low levels of interior resource exploitation in a colonial State where the focus was on commercial plantation agriculture on the coastal plain. Although the inherent problems are recognised and attempts are being made to address them by instituting more networking among heads of agencies, the inherent problems remain. As a study of the industry commissioned by the late President Jagan summed it up: Guyana has no comprehensive laws on land-use planning, monitoring, and enforcement. Instead, much sectoral law and many institutions have evolved, creating conflicts and overlaps in jurisdiction. As a result, the administration and use of the State Forests are encumbered (Sizer, 1996). Research in tropical rain forests: Its challenges for the future – p. 143 It is against this backdrop that the most recent developments in extending the State Forests and granting exploratory concessions to large foreign operators have to be assessed. In late September 1997, a newspaper article revealed that Guyana’s President had assented to an order extending the boundaries of the State Forest to incorporate in excess of 4.4 million hectares south of the fourth parallel (Singh, 1997). Added to the 6.3 million hectares of forest already under the control of the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC), the Order extends the State’s power to enter into agreements pertaining to all of Guyana’s forests, most of which are now allocated, either under State Forest Permissions, Wood Cutting Leases, Timber Sales Agreements, or, most recently, three-year exploratory leases. Within this context, one does not have to argue the importance of land-use planning and sustainable forest management for Guyana’s forests; one has to worry about the ability of the State to plan and to enforce its regulations. In response to the criticisms of its forest policy, the Government of Guyana has pointed to a number of on-going initiatives aimed at institutional strengthening and enhancing local monitoring and regulatory capacity. Among these are:
Guyana was often described by its late President as a country studied to death by foreign consultants. After the initial launch and press release, however, most of the studies relating to the forestry sector remain on the shelf. There has been little progress, for example, in adopting and implementing any of the key recommendations of the Government-commissioned Sizer study and, in fact, a circumvention of one of its seven key actions - to maintain and extend the scope of the moratorium on major forest land-use decisions - has taken place with the recent signing of exploratory leases with three additional Malaysian companies. A Forest (Exploratory Permits) (Amendment) Bill was pushed through Parliament by the Government’s majority vote in July 1997, clearing the way for the granting of three-year exploratory leases to the Berjaya Group, Kwitaro Investments, and Solid Timbers, in spite of protests from opposition political parties and Amerindian organisations. Meanwhile, there is a continuing focus on traditional forestry practices, with little effort at diversification of the sector. While it is manifestly true that a change of focus to encompass new land-use practices (e.g. a system of protected areas, ecotourism, biodiversity prospecting, and the development of NTFPs) is not easily accommodated, the fact is that the business-as-usual approach has intensified, with the sector even more dedicated to the extraction of softwood logs destined for plywood production both in Guyana and Asia, and of hardwoods for the export market. At the same time, there has been no progress in incorporating social forestry issues at any level, neither in debate nor in planning. While the Department of International Development, U.K., is currently funding assistance to strengthen the Guyana Forestry Commission, neither would deny a limited capacity to monitor even the current impacts of traditional forestry. The Hobley Report (1997) The Tropenbos Foundation, Wageningen, the Netherlands – p. 144 recommended that clarity and consensus be developed on what is meant by sustainable forest management and that a focus on socially integrated forest management be adopted by the entire GFC, and not isolated in a special unit or section. Hobley concluded that: Thus far (May 1997), the social issues surrounding forest management and its practice have not been considered, and it became rapidly apparent that this is an area that needs to be urgently addressed. Perhaps one of the most important issues to note is that what is being recommended here is not social forestry but socially integrated forestry. This is a fundamentally different approach and places the onus on individual foresters within the organisation to take a more holistic view of forest management, and not to relegate the social issues to one individual or unit charged with responsibility for social forestry. As a related example, the first of Sizer’s seven key recommendations was that the permanent forest estate should be defined and that this should include production forest for timber harvesting, biodiversity hot spots in need of protection, forests for community management, and protection forests on steep slopes and other fragile environments (Sizer, 1996). There is no sign that these words have any meaning for the responsible authorities in Guyana. No concrete steps have been taken to date to establish a Protected Areas System, and this in spite of several years of work by the World Wildlife Fund and the World Bank and a commitment by the Global Environment Facility to fund the first five years of such a process. While the Government maintains that the heads of all relevant agencies meet weekly under the chairmanship of the Presidential Advisor on Technology, for the purpose of coordinating approaches to applications for concessions, eliminating overlaps in jurisdiction, etc., it is doubtful whether the system can function effectively, given the staff constraints that limit the State’s ability to monitor on-the-ground. A related problem is that the same few Guyanese administrators and technocrats have to attend to a myriad of duties - only a small part of which concern applications for mining and forestry permits, etc. In practice, it seems that there is a minimal focus on the preparation of briefs, and that little attempt is made to involve what technocrats are available in the business of these meetings. In the assessment of many commentators, there is little follow-up, nor even a clear scrutiny of the issues involved, although the existence of a networking mechanism is touted as being the fulfilment of an often-identified need. Research in tropical rain forests: Its challenges for the future – p. 145 In Sizer’s assessment: It is far from clear that the ODA’s forest sector work, the German GTZ land-use program, GEF activity at Iwokrama and on national protected areas planning - as well as the development of the Environmental Protection Agency by the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank - are working in a coordinated and mutually informed way toward their highly complementary goals (Sizer, 1996). The 1995 study of indigenous uses of the forest conducted by the ARU (Forte, 1995) identified a key need to develop mechanisms for involving the Regional system of Government (instituted in 1980) in the monitoring of land-use decisions in respective regions. As alluded to above, the vertical autonomous operations of agencies like the GFC limit interactions of field representatives with the central office. In practice, the system excludes the possibility of monitoring or networking involving Regional officials, or Amerindian village councils. Secondly, it opens the way for local-level corruption since there is no higher or second level of monitoring over forest wardens who are operating, to all intents and purposes, quite autonomously. In September/October 1997, for example, a large vessel moored at the mouth of the Corentyne River was loading up softwood logs for export to Asia, buying from a variety of suppliers working in the Corentyne River. At the local level, many stories were circulating of logs cut illegally in Suriname and brought to the Guyana shore for sale, of illegal and unregulated cutting in Guyana, of corruption of the officials involved, etc. But the Region 6 Administration had no legal or other authority to supervise any of the transactions. The same applies in all the regions, and certainly in the more accessible areas where the increased forest activity is concentrated. The Draft Forest Policy recommends that Amerindian councils and private owners with more than 100 hectares of forest land shall be encouraged to develop and implement sustainable forest management plans for forests on their lands. The Guyana Forestry Commission shall assist in the preparation of these plans (Government of Guyana,1997). There are 75 titled Amerindian villages controlling about 16 per cent of the national territory. Heightened logging and sawmilling activities, involving outsiders, have been reported from an increasing number of them, including Sebai, Manawarin, Kwebana, and villages in the Pomeroon, Berbice, and Corentyne Rivers. None of these operations is currently being monitored for sustainability or anything else, while the Village Councils generally lack the capacity to negotiate fair deals. Long-term goals of sustainability are being sacrificed in the interests of immediate cash returns, in a context where there are few avenues for wage-earning and increasing needs for access to money. On the other hand, the indigenous people's traditional knowledge of the resources of their forest environment can rarely be turned into cash. Indigenous people are often reduced to engaging in unsustainable practices (e.g. unregulated wildlife harvesting, palmheart or commercial timber extraction), because there are no other opportunities for employment available to them in their areas. Concomitantly, fewer and fewer of the young people pay heed to the traditional knowledge inherited from thousands of years of interaction with a complex - still little understood - ecosystem. The macro-picture, therefore, is of a fragile forest resource under increasing threat from an exploitation style that differs little from that of mining. Lip service is being paid to the concept that, under unregulated forestry, the biological resource is as finite and exhaustible as a mineral resource, but effective regulations have yet to be put in place, and the capacity to enforce them remains a distant rumour. It is impossible to be optimistic about the future of Guyana's forests as long as the issues claim their current low priority in official circles. This makes me pessimistic about the future of Guyana’s forest peoples, squeezed in between failure of their traditional livelihood and exclusion from any opportunity in the industry that is based on their biological capital. This is the social aspect of Sustainable Forest Management which, for me, signifies the doomed irony of the term, used as it is, The Tropenbos Foundation, Wageningen, the Netherlands – p. 146 and arising as it did, in forums such as this.
REFERENCES Bishop, A.R. (1996). Baseline Document on Land Use in Guyana. Georgetown: Govt. of Guyana, University of Guyana, The Carter Center, Guyana Environmental Monitoring and Conservation Organisation, World Resources Institute. Colchester, M. (1997). Guyana’s Fragile Frontier: Loggers, Miners and Forest Peoples. Latin America Bureau, United Kingdom. Colchester, M. (1997). Aid money is helping the rape of Guyana. Guardian Weekly, August 17, 1997, United Kingdom. Forte, J. ed. (1995). Situation Analysis Indigenous Use of the Forest with Emphasis on Region 1. University of Guyana, Amerindian Research Unit, Guyana. Government of Guyana (1996). National Development Strategy: Shared Development through a Participatory Economy. 6 vols. Ministry of Finance, Guyana. Government of Guyana (1997). Forests Bill 1997 (draft). Georgetown, Guyana. Government of Guyana and United Nations Development Programme (1997). Human Development Report 1996. Georgetown, Guyana. Hobley, M. (1997). Social Issues in Forestry in Guyana: The ways forward for Phase 2 of the Guyana Forestry Commission Support Project. Report prepared for the Guyana Forestry Commission and the Department for International Development (formerly ODA). Singh, G. (1997). President signs order extending State Forest. Sunday Stabroek newspaper, September 28, 1997, front page. Guyana. Sizer, N. (1996). Profit Without Plunder: Reaping Revenue from Guyana’s Tropical Forests Without Destroying Them. World Resources Institute, United States. Valkenburg, J.L.C.H. van. (1997). Non-Timber Forest Products of East Kalimantan: Potentials for Sustainable Forest Use. Tropenbos Series 16. The Tropenbos Foundation, Wageningen, the Netherlands. Verheij, B. and Reinders M. (1997). The status of the extraction and marketing of timber and non-timber forest products by Amerindians in the Guyanese context. Bos Nieuwsletter 16(1) 35: 15-22. Research in tropical rain forests: Its challenges for the future – p. 147 LAND-USE PLANNING AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT Achievements:
Challenges and Problems; Information Needs:
Points for Future Research
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