A $65-MILLION experiment in applying science to save tropical
forests, hatched by Commonwealth leaders seven years ago at the height of
world concern over the disappearance of rainforests, faces collapse. With only
$5 million spent, the last British scientist involved pulls out from
the near-empty field centre in Guyana next week.
鈥淚t looks as if it鈥檚 on its death bed,鈥� says Guyana-born British botanist
Conrad Gorinsky, coauthor of the Commonwealth plan. 鈥淚t鈥檚 tragic. I feel a
real opportunity has been lost.鈥�
In 1989, the president of Guyana, Desmond Hoyte, offered 360 000 hectares
of virgin forest 鈥渇or the benefit of the whole international community鈥�.
杏吧原创s would be free to use the forest, the size of a large English
county, to develop techniques for exploiting and conserving forests that could
be copied by other nations. He challenged Commonwealth leaders to match his
offer of land with project funds.
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The following year, the Commonwealth accepted a plan drawn up by the Indian
scientist Monkombu Swaminathan to spend $65 million in the Iwokrama
forest between 1991 and 1996. The project should have had 24 鈥渃ore scientific
staff鈥� and a constant throughput of contract researchers, teachers, students,
botanists and specialists in forestry and mining.
But only some $5 million has been made available, and most of this
came in a startup grant from the UN Development Programme. The field centre at
Kurupukari on the edge of the forest has stayed almost empty, with never more
than four scientists, who have been plagued by malaria. What was intended to
be a two-year interim phase is now into its fifth year. There is no sign of
the project鈥檚 centrepiece, a fully staffed international research centre in
Georgetown, the Guyanese capital.
Next week the last of three foreign scientists installed by the
Commonwealth Secretariat quits, leaving the huge project area in the hands
of the interim director, Henry Tschinkel, assisted by one Guyanese scientist
and half a dozen rangers. Tschinkel has agreed to stay until March 1997, when
the funds will run out.
Under the Commonwealth scheme, botanists would have prospected for valuable
medicinal plants and other genetic resources, foresters would have developed
ways of harvesting trees sustainably, ecotourists would have visited for a
鈥渞ainforest experience鈥�, and researchers would have developed ecologically
sound methods of mining gold and diamond reserves. Virtually none of this has
happened.
Last week, the project鈥檚 interim trustees met at the Commonwealth
Secretariat in London to discuss future funding, but broke up without any
firm offers.
Chandrasekhar Krishnan, an official of the Secretariat, said after the
meeting that he still hopes that the project will continue, and that legal
arrangements currently before the Guyanese parliament might encourage
donors.
鈥淭raditional donor agencies such as the British Overseas Development
Administration are suffering cuts in their budgets. So we are looking to
nontraditional sources, such as wealthy individuals,鈥� says Krishnan. The ODA,
which paid for site survey work costing 拢200 000, said this week that
future funding for lwokrama was 鈥渘ot a priority鈥� in its aid to Guyana.
The scientist leaving the project next week is Ivan Anderson, seconded from
the ODA鈥檚 Natural Resources Institute. 鈥淭hings are not quite as bad as you may
think,鈥� he says. His small team collected baseline data on biodiversity,
archaeology and meteorology, for instance. And in a report issued at the end
of January, Tschinkel says that a weather station and an information centre
will be completed in Kurupukari this year.
But all this is a long way from the original intention to set up an
international demonstration project for sustainable forest development, says
Gorinsky. If the project fails 鈥渢he loggers will get their way in Guyana鈥�, he
says. 鈥淭hey are already cutting down huge areas of the forest.鈥�