Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

significant improvements in the situation of Amerindian communities adversely
affected. Welcome as such steps are, their long-term impact may prove limited if
they continue to dominate economic development in Guyana’s interior in the current
fashion, and the country remains economically dependent on the operations of largely
transnational corporate enterprises of dubious integrity.
There are two major avenues to rectifying this situation relevant to the subject
matter of this thesis, and possible steps along each have already been taken in
Guyana. Operational reform of both industries, firstly, is already underway. Within the
logging industry in particular, the potential for Amerindian involvement in monitoring
is great, and calls have been made from within both Guyana’s academic community
and the forestry industry itself for the initiation of large-scale programmes to realise
this. From within the industry has come a suggestion for a large-scale programme of
monitoring of logging concessions by members of neighbouring Amerindian
communities, with the direct financial support of the logging companies themselves
(De Freitas 1998). This is in many ways similar to an earlier suggestion for a state-
sponsored programme of training for Amerindian Environmental Monitors who could
represent state interests in monitoring and regulating industrial activities in the
interior, in collaboration with the Forestry Commission and Environmental Protection
Agency (Forte 1995a: 8). Forte’s point that this could be achieved partly through
existing training courses at the Guyana Forestry Commission appears to have been
taken up, if not on the scale she advocates. An article in the Stabroek News of July 3,
1999 reported the then-Minister of Amerindian Affairs to have disclosed that,
starting in 1998, the government had begun to provide five scholarships annually for
the support of Amerindian students training on the Certificate Course in Forestry. The
Minister also noted that the GFC at the time employed 23 Amerindian members of
staff, most of whom had been recruited on the basis of their botanical knowledge and
in particular tree identification skills.
Amerindian knowledge has been a central aspect of Guyana’s logging industry
since its inception, as evinced by the fact that the vernacular terms for most tree
species consist of their Lokono names, some of which have also been incorporated
into Creolese (Polak 1992: 12-13). The proposals described above thus incorporate a
certain historical logic, as well as great practical merit. I would further advocate that
any such programmes incorporate a substantial research effort dedicated to
developing methodologies in ecological monitoring based upon Amerindian knowledge,
whether intellectual or practical in nature. Biological resource inventories currently in
planning or underway, such as the national forest inventory, whose inception was