Forest body preparing to enter EU market with 5-year-plan

Dec 31, 2014 News

At the final board meeting of the Forest Products Development and Marketing Council (FPDMC) for 2014, a new five-year strategic plan was presented. The plan is geared to prepare the industry for entry into the lucrative European Market following the completion of the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) which is currently being negotiated under Guyana/EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) arrangement.
In the EU’s FLEGT Action Plan announced in 2003, a range of measures was set out to tackle illegal logging in the world’s forests. For companies wanting to trade forest products with the EU, stringent record-keeping procedures will have to be followed.
In the address by Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment, Robert Persaud, to the board and staff of the FPDMC, he emphasised the need for the private sector in the timber industry to move in the direction of value added timber products and expressed hope that the strategic plan is geared to fulfill this requirement.
Executive Director of the council, Rajnarine Singh, in his address to the gathering, pointed out that the first five-year strategic plan which covered the period of 2009-2014, which the council used to create its yearly work plan, was fully exhausted. For this reason a new plan was formulated.