Projects

Monitoring and Research - North West Guyana

Sustainable Timber Production Programme

The contract for this project was suspended in December 2000 because our client was forced to make economies as a direct consequence of depressed market prices for timber and timber products. During the interim world prices have failed to recover and it therefore seems unlikely that work on this project will be reactivated in the near future.

During the period leading up to the suspension of the contract the project team carried out an audit of our client's forest operations, against FSC principles and criteria. This audit confirmed that the company was closely compliant with most of these and concluded that, with some minor adjustments to its procedures and practices, it could readily have its operations certified.

Though it has not been possible to continue to collect growth and yield data from the project area, the dataset, compiled during the previous period of the project, has been shared with a number of researchers who have compared and contrasted it to similar datasets collected from other tropical forests.