Guyana has most funding on per capita basis from Norway MOU – President
…warns against sloganeering without a real commitment
PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo says Guyana has received the most money of any country, on a per capita basis, as a payment for services provided by forests with the Norway MOU coming to fruition in the form of ‘money in the bank’.

“The most in the world of any other country…Brazil is the other country and they got a few hundred million for a large number of people. We got US$70 million for less than one million people,” the President said.

He was speaking at the launching of a Ministry of Agriculture and Guyana Forestry Commission hosted seminar on forests and their role. The event, held at the Guyana International Conference Centre, had presentations from the Guyana Forestry Commission, WWF Guianas, Iwokrama, Conservation International Guyana and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Those in attendance included many loggers and persons working in the forestry sector. Many persons of indigenous descent were present at the event.

Delivering the feature address, the President urged those in the forestry sector and all stakeholders not to allow the United Nations declared 2011 International Year of the Forests to become another year of sloganeering but to learn of the importance of forests and their role in the fight against climate change.

“We must not just sloganeer about these issues in a superficial way. At the end of the year we must emerge with a greater consciousness of the issue at hand and a commitment to doing something about it,” he said.

He said, “And so this year – the International Year of Forests – another theme of the United Nations, I hope that globally and locally, we would understand and have an awakened consciousness as to the role of forests and that we will all, not just in Guyana, emerge out of this year with a commitment to do something about our forests…”

The President said forests are very important to the world but “if we look at forests in isolation from climate policy then we would be making a serious mistake.”

He noted that, in the industrialised world, some countries are “lovers” of forests and forest preservation.
“But their climate change policies are the most atrocious and would lead to the destruction of our world. So a country could easily appropriate US$30 million to support forest initiatives and are unwilling to commit to a global agreement that seeks to cut carbon emissions,” Mr. Jagdeo said.

The President explained that if those emissions are not cut and the concentration of gases continues to grow, “you are going to have a temperature increase that would simply be unsustainable.”

According to the President, out of the Copenhagen Accord, which was hailed as progressive, the world is well on its way to a temperature increase of between 3 to 5 degrees Celsius. “If that happens then there would be no issue of preserving forests. The forests are going to die by themselves. They would not survive…particularly tropical forests,” he said.

President Jagdeo made it clear he was not referring to Norway when he spoke of some developed countries having bad climate policies.

“You cannot say that you want to preserve forests and then you pursue policies that may lead to their eventual total destruction,” the Guyanese head of state declared.

“I hope that the countries who sign-on to the International Year of Forests that they recognise that it is related also to their climate change policies,” Mr. Jagdeo stated.

The President said Guyanese have a clearer understanding of these issues than many developed countries do “because our people have led the way and it has been a broad-based leadership, from the top all the way to the grassroots organisations.”

“We have to preserve our forests…we have to find a balance between preservation and development,” he said. “I am very happy for the work done by many committed people, from NGOs to the political directorate to the Toshaos, the community organisations. If there is any credit to be given to anyone, it would be collectively to all of us,” he said.

“We have contributed as a country to the evolution of the debate surrounding putting values to forests and the services they provide and we have contributed significantly to the evolution of the concept of REDD plus, expanding it from just REDD, which includes conservation and we have contributed significantly to the debate in the UNFCCC as to the creation of a mechanism that will compensate people for forests,” the President said.

Challenging the critics, the President said that long before the McKinsey study on Guyana’s forests, Guyana said it is prepared to deploy the entire forest in the service to the world in fighting climate change.

“Some thought it was a crazy scheme, that we were giving away our country, and who would pay for this? That the Government was running off on a harebrained scheme…” he said.
“To give credibility to the model, we had to get a major consultancy firm to work with us to demonstrate the economics of our forests…to add ‘a dollar and cents value’ to our trees and the foregone opportunities by keeping those trees standing,” he explained. “That was the extent of McKinsey’s work. McKinsey did not negotiate the deal with Norway; McKinsey did not participate on our behalf in the UNFCCC negotiations,” Mr. Jagdeo pointed out.
“We have changed this decades-old notion that forests only give us wood…now we are getting paid for forest services too,” he said.
However, the President made it clear to loggers and logging companies present at the event that their livelihoods would not be jeopardised.

“We have been focused on ensuring that there is greater equity, because traditionally, it is just the large companies that are involved,” he said, speaking of the shifting policies which have allowed smaller loggers to group together and form a community logging association thereby accessing a concession.