By Cathy Shufro, from the Spring 2007 issue of Environment: Yale magazine.

F&ES doctoral student Janette Bulkan had just returned home to Guyana in February 2006 when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) made a groundbreaking announcement: the group had helped the largest of the Asian controlled timber companies logging in Guyana to gain certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The Barama Company Limited had promised to hew to rigorous international standards for responsible forest management and fair labor practices as it harvested trees in the vast Guyanese rainforest.

The 1.4 million acres covered by the agreement is only a third of the government owned land on which the Barama Company has a renewable 25-year logging concession. Still, certification by the FSC was an important step forward: this 2,200-square mile tract would have been the world’s largest certified stretch of natural tropical forest.

To announce the agreement, the Barama Company joined the WWF in a ceremony at a hotel in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown. “With this milestone,” said WWF Guianas official Patrick Williams, “Barama not only serves as a catalyst for improved forest management systems,” but also ensures that “the national patrimony is protected for the benefit of present and future generations.” Barama General Manager Girwar Lalaram said that FSC certification “opens the door to new buyers in Europe and North America that demand forest products from well-managed forests.”

“I thought, ‘I have a choice. I can simply plod on with my fieldwork and thesis – the easier road – or I can publicize my findings.’ I decided that I didn’t just want to be a Yale student.” Janette Bulkan

The word milestone seemed legitimate: on a planet that has lost more than half its natural tropical moist forests, the Guiana Shield forest is one of only four that remain relatively undisturbed by human activities. (The others are in the Amazon, the Congo and Papua New Guinea.) The United Nations Development Programme had backed efforts to preserve the forests in this emerging democracy, which is east of Venezuela and north of Brazil. Most of Guyana’s 750,000 inhabitants live on the coast, and forest covers about 80 percent of the country.

Certification sets standards for a wide range of environmental and social factors, as well as for technical forestry, including minimizing erosion and keeping water sources clean; hiring local workers and treating them fairly; and respecting the rights of indigenous forest-dwellers to control harvesting in their traditional territories. The FSC imprimatur should please manufacturers courting conscientious consumers, who would prefer Barama’s certified timber to logs (or furniture and flooring) of unknown provenance.

This was the sort of agreement that Janette Bulkan had been working toward for years. Before coming to New Haven to study in 2004, she had served as first chair of the Guyana National Initiative for Forest Certification. And yet the certification of Barama angered Bulkan. Her fieldwork in the Guyanese forests and her family’s involvement in timber processing had acquainted her with the Barama Company. She said that Barama gave the best-paying jobs to imported Asian workers, not locals; it owed back taxes to the government; it encroached on Amerindian lands; and it cut too many of the most valuable trees, threatening their commercial survival. As Bulkan put it, she knew “something of what was hidden behind the showcase.”

Environmental groups, including the WWF, had long criticized the logging practices of Barama’s Malaysian parent company, Samling Global. Samling operates the second-largest timber company in Malaysia, and it logs in the Sarawak, one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. The Penan aboriginal people in Sarawak live mostly off the land in an area that a WWF forester described as “off the biodiversity scale” in its richness. For two years, some of the Penan blockaded the forest that they claimed as theirs. The Penan asserted that loggers had polluted their rivers, causing fish to die, and that sacred sites had been damaged. Police removed the blockade in February 2007, and Samling has brought its bulldozers to the forest.

Given what Bulkan knew about Barama and about Samling’s record, she saw certification as “a shocking travesty.” She explained that, “in a small place like Guyana, we can only save tropical forests with collaboration from the global North.” Guyana needs such collaborations, she said, in part because corruption is widespread. In its annual surveys of perceptions of corruption by the Germany-based nonprofit Transparency International, Guyana does poorly. In its 2006 list that rated countries from least to most corrupt, the group ranked Guyana as 121st among 163 countries. (Finland had the top ranking, the United States was 20th and Haiti was last.) The FSC could provide some leverage against such corruption, said Bulkan. “We depend on the FSC to represent and protect social justice, equity, a place at the table for workers and respect for national laws and worker rights. When they would then close their eyes to the egregious behavior of this company, clear violations of FSC principles and criteria, we felt that all hope was lost.”

Bulkan had known the forest since childhood. Although her great-grandparents had come to Guyana from India as indentured sugar cane cutters, their children – her grandparents – had established a succession of sawmills in rural areas. Bulkan was born in a sawmill compound, and she tells people: “I have sawdust in my veins.”

That sawdust comes from a forest that is home to nearly 800 species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish, including sharp-toothed black caimans, critically endangered trunkback turtles, giant anteaters, anaconda snakes as long as 30 feet, the carnivorous wimple piranha and the 10-foot-long arapaima, and 500 bird species, from the agile crimson topaz hummingbird to the ungainly and primitive-looking hoatzin – a chicken-sized bird with a blue face and a spiky crest of feathers whose young have claws on their wings.

The Guyanese forest comprises 1,100 species of trees. Commercially desirable species include the green heart, purple heart, locust and mora, which have exceptionally durable and attractively colored wood that is prized worldwide for decking, flooring and furniture, hence the attraction for Barama and the other international timber companies. Barama was originally attracted to Guyana for the medium-density baromalli timber to make utility plywood. The wood used for flooring is very dense, because trees grow slowly in the infertile soil that is the product of weathering of Proterozoic rocks. Unless these trees are harvested sustainably, said Bulkan, “this is a world treasure that will be destroyed.”

Bulkan soon realized that even though Barama was certified, she could still play a role in protecting the forest. Because the certification system requires routine audits, an audit could provide a forum for local voices. In early November, the Guyana Citizens’ Initiative invited Bulkan to speak on the issue at the same hotel in Georgetown where the certification had been announced months earlier. About 80 people attended, and the two independent local newspapers reported on the talk. Bulkan joined with eight other Guyanese activists (including three representatives of the Amerindian Peoples Association, which is the leading indigenous NGO) to press for a meeting with the auditor, a South Africa-based company called SGS Qualifor.

When SGS visited Guyana in late November, Bulkan’s group asked the company to respond to a list of 36 questions and concerns about Barama and the certification process itself. Bulkan’s group also gave the list to the FSC accreditation authority, the Germany-based Accreditation Services International (ASI), which was, in turn, assessing how well SGS was evaluating Barama. That audit found significant problems, and SGS suspended Barama’s certification on January 9. The public summary of the report, issued that same month by ASI, cited nine “major non conformities” with evaluation procedures.

Bulkan called the suspension of Barama’s certificate “a huge victory.” The process, she said, validated the FSC procedures and pointed out the weaknesses in the application of law and regulation in Guyana. “It will send a signal to local companies in places like Guyana, where civil society is weak and regulatory agencies are corrupt, that you have to do it right. You have to obey the law, regulations and FSC requirements if you want to sell your timber under the label of responsible forest stewardship.”

The ASI report asserts that Barama harvested trees on Amerindian reservations outside its concession without informed consent from the indigenous communities, and that a Barama subcontractor had not paid the Amerindians for wood cut there; that Barama failed to provide workers with basic health care and adequate safety equipment; that it neglected to prepare a public summary of its management plan for more than half the land it controls and lacked required plans to control erosion; and that it improperly disposed of oil and other hazardous waste. The audit gives SGS until June 2007 to correct all the problems. The public summary of the SGS evaluation report has not yet been published, perhaps because SGS has indicated that it will appeal the ASI findings. SGS has not yet responded to the 36 points raised by Bulkan and her colleagues.

Shortly after the suspension was announced, Barama officials wrote to the WWF saying it was committed to correcting problems and restoring certification. Still, the suspension was a setback for the conservation group. “Was the suspension of the Barama certificate disappointing? Yes, to all involved parties, including the CEO of the parent company, Samling, by his own admission,” said Bruce Cabarle ’83, the managing director for the WWF Global Forest Program. “There’s no question that they had done some serious things wrong. Does this mean that all hope is lost? Not yet. The acceptance of the problems and the willingness to address them, by all involved parties, is a source of hope. The FSC system, after all, was designed to find and fix problems.”

Cabarle said that the WWF would push hard to make sure that Barama also agreed to stricter guidelines for logs taken from outside the areas of forest that were certified.

He added that the WWF chose to engage with Barama despite Samling’s record “because it represented the first wave of foreign investment in a relatively intact area of forests of global significance (the Guiana Shield). We felt it important to set a precedent, early, if we were to have any influence on subsequent waves as the tropical timber trade moved out of Malaysia due to dwindling log supplies. The Samling representatives running the operation at that time were willing to engage, reached out and did everything we asked of them (albeit not without delay or difficulty) to get Barama certified. We took, and still maintain, the long view on this.”

The Barama Company reiterated its intention to work toward reinstatement of certification at a February meeting in Bonn, Germany, with representatives of the FSC and its accreditor and the WWF. The company website states: “As a responsible and responsive company, we have assigned the resources to take the necessary actions to lift the suspension. These include: conducting the necessary tests, conducting refreshment training on first aid treatment, installing the necessary facilities at the camp sites within our concession, and procuring and upgrading the necessary equipment recommended by the independent assessor. … Barama is committed to sustainable forest management and practices. …” (Neither Barama nor Samling officials could be reached for comment, despite attempts to contact them in Guyana and in Asia, both directly and through Hill & Knowlton in Malaysia, which handles public relations for Samling.)

Bulkan believes that news of the process of suspension and negotiation will resonate with citizens’ groups worldwide that are trying to protect local resources: “It means that marginal voices will be heard.”

The Guyana story is part of a much bigger picture, said Lisa Curran, professor of tropical resources and director of the Tropical Resources Institute at F&ES. Curran has observed the gap between policy and practice while visiting remote logging camps in Indonesia, which she said are “hemorrhaging wood.” She has seen Asian timber companies “trying to greenwash and co-opt the (certification) system,” even buying out the newspaper in Papua New Guinea to stem bad publicity.

Where totalitarian regimes dominate, she said, companies don’t expect much regulation. “In these remote frontier cultures where there’s no real rule of law, there’s not a lot of accountability.” And because low-level officials are often very poor, “there’s a lot of incentive to look the other way with a little baksheesh (bribe).”

Because of that corruption, even the most conscientious American shopper can be duped. Curran recently spied a goodlooking and inexpensive bookcase at a Marshalls store near New Haven. It carried a sticker proclaiming that it was made from “Indonesia plantation wood,” but Curran recognized that the wood had to have been harvested in the wild. “If I wasn’t in the field, I would have looked at the bookshelf and said to myself, ‘Great, it’s wood grown on a plantation.’” (She didn’t buy the shelf.)

This sort of consumer uncertainty is the weak link in the certification process, said Benjamin Cashore, professor of environmental policy and governance and of political science. “The largest benefits of certification have yet to accrue,” said Cashore, who specializes in sustainable forest policy. “They require consumers to know about the system.” He recommends a single universal label for all products that are in some way certified, whether they are organic apples or Yale T-shirts not made in sweatshops.

At this point, he said, certification serves more as an insurance policy for industries worried that an advocacy group will target and embarrass them. Cabarle agrees, calling certification more of a mechanism “for managing a potential risk than it is for marketing some environmental attribute.” Certification can also attract capital. “If you are positioning your company to be socially responsible or environmentally responsible or to access capital from socially responsible investment funds, this is a tool you can use to substantiate that.”

Indeed, Bulkan and her Guyanese colleague, Jocelyn Dow, both suggest that Barama’s move toward certification may have been calculated to bolster its initial public stock offering on the Hong Kong Exchange on March 7. Even before the offering, Reuters reported that the company had sold more than a billion shares, raising $280 million. The Samling website cites two certified operations, one in Malaysia under the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (less stringent than FSC), and the other in New Zealand, an 86,000-acre plantation called Hikurangi Forest Farms (HFF), with FSC certification. “With the FSC certification, HFF now has an edge in the market to deliver quality and certified wood products,” the website states.

Bulkan remains in Guyana, writing her thesis. Her research is on the relationship between forest policy and what actually takes place in the forest, an issue that she said is vital not only in Guyana but also in other fragile nation states in Latin America, Africa and Asia that are threatened by “the draining of the world’s resources for the emerging economies of China and India.”

Her role in pushing for scrutiny of the certification system in Guyana grew out of her academic work, but it required her to step beyond it. “I was finding out these amazing things, and I thought, ‘I have a choice. I can simply plod on with my fieldwork and thesis write-up – the easier road – or I can publicize my findings; I can tell this monumental story of slippage between written policies and actual practices in the forest; and perhaps I can galvanize some public response to the hemorrhaging of prime timbers in Asia.’ I decided that I didn’t just want to be a Yale student.”