News from Guyana: 15 Columns on Forest-Related News Published in the Quarterly CFA Newsletter, March 2011 to March 2015

The 15 columns document and analyze the principal forestry-related processes and events in Guyana during the final three-years in office (2011-2015) of the ethnic East Indian-dominated government that ruled uninterruptedly for 22 years (1992-2015). The evidence and consequences for the forests, economy and society of Guyana’s large-scale and long-term illegal logging and log trading are presented and assessed. I show how regulatory capture is manifest in the ways in which the log export policy from 2009 served the interests of the dominant Asian log exporters and the budget of the Guyana Forestry Commission while being fiscally ineffective. I show the points at which the Government of Guyana failed to use regulation and fiscal measures to make the implementation of national policies for in-country timber processing commercially feasible. I document the faltering steps taken to implement one of the conditions in the Guyana-Norway Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed in November 2009, which is ‘evidence of Guyana entering a formal dialogue with the European Union with the intent of joining its Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) processes towards a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA)’. One of the key elements of a VPA is a legality verification system (LVS), to provide assurance that timber imported into the EU from the producer country shall have been produced at least legally if not sustainably.