Supporting indigenous peoples’ communities to influence trade agreements with the EU

In 2012 Guyana started negotiations with the EU with the aim of entering into a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) that will seek to ensure that Guyana exports only legal timber into the EU market. The VPA is a measure required under the Action Plan on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) adopted by the EU in 2003 which aims to reduce illegal logging by strengthening sustainable forest management, improving governance and promoting trade in legally produced timber.

Central in the VPA is a definition of what constitutes ‘legal timber’ and it is the responsibility of each partner country to develop such a legality definition. The EU emphasises the importance of broad stakeholder participation in this process.

 

After concerns were raised in Guyana about the lack of effective participation from civil society in the VPA process, and especially from indigenous peoples’ communities, the EU awarded a project to the Amerindian Peoples Association and FPP named ”Promoting the effective participation of indigenous peoples in the Voluntary Partnership Agreement in Guyana”. The project receives co-funding from DFID’s Forest Markets and Governance Programme.

Land issues and the VPA process

Since the beginning of the year, material discussing FLEGT and related issues has been developed and used in six workshops bringing together people from 24 communities in regions 1 and 2, which are the areas most impacted by logging. The workshops included an introduction to FLEGT and the VPA process and, given that these were new concepts for most participants, triggered a number of questions and concerns. Many wanted to know how the VPA will deal with the current land disputes and asked how it could be decided whether a log is legal when different actors claim to own the land it comes from. This concern is linked to the fact that most of the land that the communities have traditionally owned, occupied and used is considered state land under existing national statutory law.

When raising their concerns with the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs they are told that they have to apply for legal title to the land or an extension if they already have a title. However, the experience of communities is that they dedicate significant time developing and submitting these applications that then disappear into official processing or are ignored entirely. Meanwhile their lands are given away to logging and mining interests. Many participants therefore called for the disputes involving their land and the outstanding applications for extensions to be dealt with before any VPA is signed.

Although land tenure forms a vital element of forest governance, Guyana’s government negotiating team has so far expressed the view that the VPA is not the forum to address broader land issues. Communities who live in and depend on the forest question this official government view. Amerindian villages and communities insist that vital governance issues must be part of the VPA negotiations and the development of a credible and robust legality definition. Villagers and indigenous organisations are concerned that important land rights and legal contradictions and loopholes have so far been side-stepped in the VPA process. Before the year is over a second round of workshops will be conducted under the APA-FPP project aiming at systematically recording further concerns and recommendations to be fed into the national process.

Weak forest governance and violations of FPIC

While the Guyana-EU VPA development process is ongoing, major problems with Guyana’s forest governance continue. Disclosure in July 2014 of the controversial dealings of the Chinese logging company Bai Shan Lin kicked off a major public debate about Guyana’s forestry concession system. Carrying proof of weak law enforcement, flawed legal and regulatory frameworks, corruption and lack of transparency in the forestry sector, this debate poses an appropriate challenge to the government’s attempt to avoid dealing with existing problems in the forest sector as a part of the VPA process.

 

In deals kept secret from public scrutiny, Bai Shan Lin was allocated vast areas of forest - some indications suggest up to 1.4 million hectares - and started extraction of logs without any environmental and social impact assessments. Some of the areas the company is said to have rented illegally from other companies. Communities in North and South Rupununi are now extremely concerned about the consequences of the company’s activities, including the building of a road, for their livelihoods. The concessions lie very close to, and in some cases even overlap, their traditionally owned land, yet they have not been consulted or have not given their consent to Bai Shan Lin’s activities. The village of Apoteri lies only 300 meters away from one of the concessions and a resident said to a local newspaper “We are too close to the concession. We don’t know what is going to happen.” He elaborated that the communities of Apoteri, Rewa and Crashwater are surrounded by the concessions and they have nowhere to go.

It is important that the experiences of these and other affected villages are fed into the VPA discussions and the ongoing APA-FPP project will help bringing representatives to fora where they can share their concerns.

More information:

Bai Shan Lin's logging operations in guyana: Exploitation, disruption and destruction

Bai Shan Lin - Aerial views of massive logging exports