Introduction

Chainsaw-logged lumber first became available to the Guyanese domestic market in the late 1980s. Until that time, lumber from fixed (static) sawmills had enjoyed a near monopoly. The few published reports that deal in whole or in part with the chainsaw logging (and milling) segment all focus on the economics of this method of timber conversion (Clarke 2005; Cumberbatch 2001; Grisley 1998; Landell-Mills 1997; Mendes and Macqueen 2005; Thomas et al. 2003). However there has been no ethnographic of the actors or of the hybrid nature of forestry practices in Guyana, in which chainsaw loggers are considered to play an integral role. By “hybrid” I mean the holder of the forest harvesting permit or sawmill license acting like a financial license holding company, with sections of the production-to-consumption chain being treated as in-house or as out-sourced modules, perhaps legally separate entities, and having independent cost structures for accountability.

The old-established fixed/static sawmills are wont to accuse chainsaw millers en bloc of illegal operations and evasion of taxes, even when they are buying squares and cants from them for resawing and, increasingly, logs for the export market. The chainsaw millers, in turn, are wont to accuse the fixed millers and larger-scale mechanized loggers of unfair access to forest resources and of insufficiently intensive harvesting and long-delayed payment of taxes. Both sides tend to believe that the other benefits from the current non-transparent allocations of State forest resources and a perceived bias in forest monitoring and policing by the State regulatory agency. In fact, each class of protagonist depends to some extent on the other, for resource access or for salvage logging or for markets.

Approximately 75 percent (16 million ha) of Guyana’s land mass of 21.6 million hectares is closed-canopy tropical moist forest. 81 percent of these forests are State Forests and are administered by the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC). The GFC also controls the trade of forest products harvested from titled Amerindian lands (an estimated 11 percent of national territory), and from public land classified as State Lands. “The giant sucking sound of Chinese forest imports” (Kaimowitz 2004) signifies the boom in imports of woo fiber into China, consequent on its 1998 ban on logging in natural forest and the rapid expansion of wood-using industries, often geared to export markets. China has been ‘hoovering up’ cheap timber from all sources, especially from countries like Guyana, where the GFC admits its weakness and the likelihood of internal corruption (GFC 2005b:23). In spite of the intensified high grading of commercial timbers, forestry’s contribution to GNP has been less than 4 percent per annum from 2000 to the present.

Research Objectives

Government cannot make rational decisions about the control of promotion of chainsaw logging without more data on the ways in which the production-to-consumption market chains operate. My thesis will examine a variety of such chains in three forested regions of Guyana to determine through semi-structured and key informant interviews and through documentary analysis who wins and who loses and how and by how much and under what conditions. These methods include both quantitative measures of resource and income flows, political power and economic change, qualitative assessments of changing power and economic relations; and the historical reconstruction of regional events. Since a high proportion of people in the hinterland are forest-dependent, this thesis is also of relevance to their livelihoods.

This information should be valuable not only in the countries of Guiana Shield where chainsaw logging and milling is prevalent although banned (in Suriname) or uneasily tolerated (in Guyana), but also in countries which are attempting licensing (Uganda) or where ineffective bans are in place (Ghana). My thesis work is also more generally relevant to Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) processes coordinated by the World Bank, where regional inter-Ministerial agreements include lavish statements of intent but real progress is often bogged for lack of hard data. For producer countries seeking Voluntary Partnership Agreements with Northern consumer regions such as the EU, my thesis will provide hitherto unavailable comparative data on slippage between paper procedures and field realities in respect of chainsaw-scale operations and large-scale mechanized forest harvesting. Through my interviews and study of all the different categories of concession holders, as well as other stakeholders, I will investigate how they are affected by and contribute to slippage between de jure and de facto forest management; how that slippage has originated; how that slippage occurs now; how that slippage works out in terms of net social impact.

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