Guyana’s forest: a goldmine of opportunities

Guyana, a developing nation, richly endowed with rare natural resources, has made significant strides in overcoming social challenges such as poverty, and food insecurity over the years. With agriculture accounting for twenty-five percentof its Gross Domestic Product and providing one third of direct national employment, the potential for a vastly expanded sector and associated economic benefits is slowly being realized.

Often, the contribution of forests to food security and nutrition is overlooked, since public perception is that the forest does not produce food commodities. However, the State of the World's Forests (FAO, 2018) recognizes that food security and nutrition, agriculture and forest management can no longer be addressed separately when reconsidering national development policies. Healthy forests support sustainable agriculture because, among other things, these ecosystems stabilize soils and climate, regulate water flows, and provide shelter and habitat to pollinators and natural predators of agricultural pests. It has been proven that when agriculture land is well integrated into forest landscapes, agricultural productivity increases and is more stable.

The forests represent a source of food, medicines and provide firewood for cooking, boiling water and other domestic necessities. In general, forests provide approximately half of the world’s renewable energy in the form of firewood. In addition, they improve water quality and continuous flows, as well as valuable income and employment for hundreds of millions of people. In difficult times, forests act as a petty cash, which provides liquidity to farmers.  According to FAO, forests generate almost one-third of the income of rural families in developing countries, either through monetary income or through satisfying subsistence needs. 

In drylands, for example, forests are responsible for providing food security, livelihoods and water security for local populations. Forests produce clean air and water, conserve biodiversity and provide adaptation and mitigation against climate change.  Just this year, according to FAO and the World Food Program, climate change and El Niño events ruined more than two thirds of farmers’ first crops due to draught. They further noted that the subsequent excess of rain damaged half of the second crops, affecting more than two million people in Central America, and of these, more than half of them urgently needed food aid.

It is also reported that approximately forty percent of the rural population is experiencing extreme poverty and rely heavily on the forest for livelihoods and food security. Therefore, these forest dependent communities could be negatively affected not only by deforestation and illegal logging of their forest, which  of course threatens traditional livelihoods and food security, but also by receive less government support. When governments do not collect significant revenues due to tax evasion by illegal activities, this condition weakens the social support that they should provide to vulnerable rural populations.

FAO contributes to work with governments to strengthening the capacities of communities that live and depend on the forest, providing assistance through the FAO-EU FLEGT programme, funded by the European Union and the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom. This programme aims to challenge illegal logging through the promotion of good governance, sustainable forest production, the legal and sustainable supply of timber in national and international markets, as well as the promotion of inclusive and legal forest based business and wood value chains. The management of forests, as a first step, produces the raw materials that generate benefits from sustainable and legal sources. It generates decent livelihoods in rural areas where commercial agricultural activities are sometimes not viable, and the income produced allows for the reduction of poverty and guarantees food security.

The programme also supports forest policy reforms, which guarantees land tenure rights for poor and vulnerable communities; particularly indigenous peoples, landless farmers and rural women and youth. This entitlement to their resource will contribute greatly to the eradication of poverty, and food and water insecurity. Resolving this situation will allow entrepreneurship and sustainable forest management. In addition, such policy reforms are recommended since they aim at encouraging small forest operators and companies to participate in sustainable forest management and legal timber value chains, giving value to forest, which will improve investments.

At present, an understanding of relationship between forest and food security is essential to build synergies and minimize trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture to feed a growing global population of 9 billion people by 2050. Guyana´s experience in improving forest governance and development of a forest based economy will generate human wellbeing by reducing poverty, strengthening food security, adapting to climate change and also generating wealth and high value in forest and their resources, which in turn will conserve it.