(2 of 3)
Suriname has been in political and financial turmoil almost from the time it gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1975. At first the Dutch and other foreign donors gave the new country generous aid, but they cut back sharply in the 1980s when Suriname suffered a series of coups and massacres. The violence culminated in a six-year civil war that led to the fall of the military regime of Lieut. Colonel Desi Bouterse in 1992.
Though peace holds at the moment, international donors are reluctant to resume large-scale aid until the government of President Ronald Venetiaan puts its tottering economic house in order. Production is in decline, the unemployment rate tops 20% and per capita annual income is only $500. Rather than risk public unrest, the government provides generous subsidies for fuel, food, water and telephone service. But the budget now exceeds revenues by 150%, and the government has been looking for easy sources of foreign exchange.
So officials were receptive in August 1993 when an Indonesian investment group named N.V. MUSA Indo-Suriname asked to buy the rights to Suriname's trees. Cash-starved regimes are fond of selling timber concessions because they can put money in a treasury at little immediate cost to the government, while other industries can take years to produce results. Timber operations often ultimately drain more money than they yield by burdening a nation's infrastructure and degrading precious natural assets, but it is easy for a sitting government to ignore these costs because they become a problem only for subsequent administrations.
The MUSA group boldly asked for timber rights to more than 15 million acres of Suriname, nearly one-third of the country. The Venetiaan administration avoided a messy political debate by instead granting a smaller concession of 375,000 acres near the Guyana border. MUSA then began logging without specifying how it will abide by Suriname's strict forestry code. Experts claim that the only profitable way to harvest MUSA's particular stretch of rain forest would be to clear-cut the region, leaving behind a wasteland. Other Asian interests have also put in timber bids. The Malaysian investment group Berjaya Group Berhad is trying to secure rights to 7.5 million acres in Suriname.
Neighboring Guyana, also desperate for quick cash, has granted huge concessions to Asian logging consortiums. The former British colony, a victim of years of Marxist economics, is poorer than any other Latin American nation except Haiti and is staggering under a $2 billion foreign debt load, an amount 10 times its gross domestic product. In 1991 the government of President Desmond Hoyte granted a Malaysian-Korean joint venture called Barama Co. Ltd. the rights to log 4.2 million acres in the country's northwest. When voters elected former Marxist Cheddi Jagan as President in 1992, Guyanese conservationists urged him to revoke that concession; instead Jagan toured Southeast Asia at Barama's expense, and his government is considering bids that would put roughly 75% of Guyana's timber under foreign control.