Iwokrama
So with not only Debt-for-Nature swaps documented, but also the World Conservation Bank aka the Global Environment Facility, and the definition of the Landscape Approach laid out as per the ‘science’ body of the Convention on Biological Diversity, let’s see how this concept has worked out in practise. Because talk is cheap, and Marxists can’t run an economy responsibly.
Consequently, let’s take a dive through projected budgets, and compare to actual results. And what better example in this regard than a GEF pilot grant recipient selling Ecosystem Services using the Landscape Approach.
And yes, we’ve been here before.
The Global Environment Fund itself produced this material, so there can be no doubt about authenticity, nor authority1. Especially as the GEF hosts the material as well, which is titled ‘Forests and the GEF - A brief look at two decades of support for forests.‘
In fact - there it is. 1991. Their first forest project. And I can’t even source a simple pamphlet supposed to sell the concept, without the feeling of utter disgust slowly creeping in. But why, you ask? Because - per their very own material - in 2003 ‘35,000 households land use right certificates issued‘. I guess private property was eliminated, or eventually, will be.
My next issue is this -
‘GEF invested $30 million in ARPA’s 1st phase for Biodiversity and SLM considerations, but its impacts on forests have been substantial, reducing deforestation in the Amazon by 80% over the past 10 years. ARPA is a key example of GEF’s approach to generate multiple environmental benefits from forests in areas of very high biodiversity and significant carbon stocks, while preserving the key functions of forests for local communities.‘
On the surface of things it sounds good, no? Unfortunately it’s really only part of the story. Those benefits gained are obviously ‘ecosystem services’, sold to private equity through GEF blended finance deals. And as for this wording… ‘preserving the key functions of forests‘… is it just me, or does that sound odd to you as well?
Well, let me show you exactly what they mean by ‘preserving the key functions of forests’. Because whatever you think it is, it ain’t.
In 2018, CIFOR-CGIAR produced a slideshow; ‘TOWARDS INTEGRATED APPROACHES FOR RECONCILING DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION OBJECTIVES: THE LANDSCAPE APPROACH‘2.
And it goes on to clarify that ‘A landscape is both a geographic area and an approach to the sustainable management of human and natural resources within this geographic area‘
All very One Health-like, because those ‘human resources’ have now been firmly placed in the hierarchy where they belong, per our overlords, who at least had the common courtesy of including those peasants along with the real stakeholders.
Well, I say that, but only recently discovered that they can easily be removed for… well, any reason. The budget was too tight, the new best available scientific consensus just dropped, or perhaps the sky was simply too blue. Hard to know for sure, given that those above in the hierarchy rule with impunity. And yes, I am absolutely serious about that.
The document carries on, outlining all the opportunities Iwokrama provide, including sustainable forestry, eco-tourism, and… well, that’s pretty much it given the spreadsheets we’ll arrive at in a minute.
Then we see some claims relating to ‘optimising landscape approaches’, and ‘good governance’, but frankly I’m too distracted to comment. Because on only the following slide they show in no uncertain terms exactly what they mean by a 'sustainably managed rainforest’.
… and just to double-check, yes, Iwokrama - it’s supposed to be a rainforest, not some Scandinavian-style over-organised agroforest, with Christmas trees planted in perfect, straight lines3, visible from outer space due to the patterns of the plantation. This isn’t a rainforest. This is… simply depressing.
The slideshow carries on, claiming there’s ‘$7-30 in economic benefits for every dollar invested’, which sounds the investment opportunity of a lifetime, and yeah - why aren’t we doing it?
Furthermore, the initiative creates jobs, and the resulting Natural Capital provides goods and services to society. And all of this is driven through bottom-up control, and made possible through blended finance.
I have, honestly, rarely seen such shameless lies before.
First off - to claim this is bottom-up is a absurd, because stakeholder participation is dictated top down. Whoever assembles the project and hires the project team essentially hires top down, and discards anyone who disagrees. This is how it works in a corporate environment - but it’s not how it should work outside of the campus, because it’s autocratic as hell.
And then there’s the matter of those absurd, claimed returns. If they were genuinely that impressive, there would be absolutely no need to structure those GEF atrocities designed to collapse using taxpayer funding. In fact, they’d almost certainly keep all of this a secret.
And - in that regard - I can only assume that ‘Thank you’ is from the bottom of the hearts of private equity, and certainly not those ‘indigenous peoples’ whose forefathers are presently rolling over in their collective graves, as their great-great-grandchildren are presently being evicted because said private equity decided to sell timber sourced via what-used-to-be their lands.
Good thing those ‘grievance mechanisms’ exist. That’ll definitely fix the issue.
We also have this Q&A over on Canopy Capital4, who monetised their ‘carbon credit’ ‘ecosystem services’ more than a decade back. I include it here, because they make clear that 50% of the ‘rainforest’ is fair game, meaning that said lands can be considered just about anything - well, apart from ‘rainforest’.
More recently, Hess leased the rights to those ‘carbon credits’ rendered by the Iwokrama ‘Natural Assets’5. Hess - the energy company. No, really. ‘It was formed by the merger of Hess Oil and Chemical and Amerada Petroleum in 1968‘6. And to compound all of this, I can only assume that this is them outright mocking us -
‘The new agreement is the world’s first under the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) initiative, and The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard (TREES) system‘.
REDD+, of course, comes courtesy of the United Nations7. No, really.
… and TREES appears a corporate, monetised version of… well, saving the environment, or something8. Which in this case appears to be entirely in line with drilling for oil.
And let me say in this regard, drill for oil as you see fit (within reason, of course). But don’t pretent you’re ‘green’ per their standards while doing so. The insane, over-the-top hypocrisy on display is completely ridiculous. Though monetisable.
With that said, let’s locate documents. We have ‘The Iwokrama International Rain Forest Programme in Guyana‘9, which contains early draft budgets. That’s incredibly convenient, because that $3m GEF grant was no doubt given on basis of a similar projection. And we see that expected income and expenditure eventually meet around the year 2007, with both settling around the $3.8m mark.
… of course, that didn’t quite materialise. Because the $3m grant from the Global Environment Facility in 199310 eventually led to an emergency restructuring in 200411, folowed by a new business plan in 2004-512.
And along with that new business plan came new projections13.
So here’s what I’ve dug up. Feel free to skip this section - they were added for the one reason that readers can independently check figures in the event they don’t believe things are rather this bad. In fact, please do. Don’t trust. Verify.
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On a single page we have Annual Reports for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 202214.
… and an Annual Report, 2012-201315.
… as well as the Annual Report, 200916.
Plus the Annual Report, 200517.
And we have the Annual Report for 200418.
We also have the Summary Reports for 1998-2002, and 2002-200319.
We also have an Operational Plan for 1998-2002, though it’s light on budgets20. It is, however, chock full of references, and drags in just about detail you might ask for.
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Either way - the documents above are essentially what I managed to dig up doing a dive. Lots and lots of Annual Reports are missing, and it’s seems fairly clear why. Here are further issues I encountered -
Figures are typically presented unaudited, with those few exceptions presented - as a general rule - show lower income and higher expenditure. Ie, losses tend to be greater than suggested.
Presentation. Category breakdowns are presented as percentages of the total, which does translate into a certain level of inaccuracy.
Annual growth is often represented in percentage terms. In one particularly heinous case, this was the only way I could estimate their annual income.
Categories commonly change. And components thereof are often merged with others in ways not immediately obvious or sensical.
All of this goes to state that these calculations are estimates. Well, apart from those of earlier years, where they presented numbers with some level of competence.
The bottom line here is that if my accountants produced annual statements in a similar way, the HMRC would shut down my business in a heartbeat. Except, of course, in the case of Iwokrama this no doubt is intentional - to hide the true state of horror.
So with all of that said, here are the figures relating to annual income, up to and inclusive of 2005. The most shocking, really, is the incredibly slow growth of earned income - practically all income is through grants.
Graphed, it looks like this. As grants expired in 2002, so did income in general.
Operating expenses saw a similar collapse as they fired everyone but skeletal staff.
The net results look as per below - but had it not been for stimulus, the numbers would have been blood red the entire time.
Then let’s look at projected income (1997) vs actual, earned income. To say that this estimate was a little wide of the mark is in itself… a little wide of the mark.
Now, let’s see projected vs real figures in terms of operating expenses. Sure, they overperformed (blue), but that was as a direct result of laying everyone off.
… and as for those original projected figures - well, here they are.
The complete and utter ridiculousness of it all can be summarised very easily - earned income came in around the $250k mark by 2004, ie around 10% of expectation. At this stage, they should of course have realised that this project was a complete and utter unredeemable failure - and pulled the plug.
Of course, with a re-launched 2004-5 business plan comes a new set of estimates. And here they are - having clearly learned absolutely nothing, they immediately project a stratospheric rise in income - which never materialised. I would graph it if only it wasn’t completely pointless, and I will show you why.
Because on the revised expectation of $1.5m of income generated by 2007, actual figures by 2009 were… somewhat lower. In fact, they were off by 64%… and two years! Consequently, I don’t actually think there’s much point is spending more time on this, because I don’t consider it realistic that these ‘experts’ were really honest about what they were there to do.
Stich Iwokrama up.
For the latter period (2017 onwards), the granularity of information does improve - however, let me quickly ram home why I can’t be bothered doing even that. Because earned income for 2019 come to around $1.2m.
… a figure, which per original projection should have been crossed by 2002, and per revised business plan of 2005-6, again in 2007. And this is also not forgetting that 40% of their income at this stage was in the form of grants.
And even diving into individual categories outline what an absolute con job this was. Because in spite of lofty promises, the number of actual ‘eco-tourists’ visiting by 2004 was less than 2 per day - which generated a net loss of $181k p/a.
By 2020, figures predictably deteriorated, and the local government had to bail out Iwokrama, using taxpayer funds. Here’s from the 2021 report, detailing that 41% of income came from the local taxpayer.
… but no doubt 2022 was an improvement? Wrong. In 2022, almost two thirds of all income came through local taxpayer funding, or foreign. In other words - Iwokrama, from a strictly business perspective - is a total disaster.
So what gives? How come it wasn’t pulled by certainly 2004, but realistically even earlier? Well, in 2002, a certified ‘expert‘ was assigned to the task of turning around Iwokrama21. Professor Ian Richard Swingland, who further serves as an ‘advisor on conservation and bio-diversity management to the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility, the Asian Development Bank, the United Kingdom Government and major corporations‘.
A top, top man22, in other words. One of the very best. And his advice?
‘Iwokrama, he said, can make money but there were deterrents, and the main one is the absence of a good road or airstrip for easy access to showcase its eco-tourism product which remains largely hidden, not only from eco-tourists but the vast majority of Guyanese‘.
And who does he suggest should pay for this road? Well, durr -
‘Moreover, much manpower and resources are in demand just to access, stock supplies and manage the facility located in the heart of the rainforest area in Region Eight (Potaro/Siparuni). And he is appealing to the government to do something quickly to upgrade the road.‘
That’s right - not only did the project not finance itself by 2002 - it fact, it wasn’t even close - but to fix the problem, the taxpayer had to cough up.
It’s strange, though. Because another top, top partner, also engaged in swapping worthless Bolivian bonds back in 1987 in exchange for prime Bolivian forests, submitted to the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve program also counted as a ‘partner’ of Iwokrama, per their 2004 Annual Report.
Conservation International.
And these onerous deals, of course, are Debt-for-Nature swaps.
Now, let’s return to the news brief above; the one on the presidential emergency, which without a hint of irony states ‘… will maintain Iwokrama’s role as an international model for the conservation and sustainable use of tropical forests‘. Because around the same time, Director General Dr. Graham Watkins announced his departure, to go work at the Charles Darwin Foundation, and thus, Galapagos23.
And you know what Galapagos has repeatedly engaged in since 1987? Yeah, that’s right - sourced throgh a 1988 report, penned by Michael Sweatman and representatives of the WWF, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Barbara Ward’s International Institute for Environment and Development and the World Resources Institute, outlining how those swaps work24... or more accurately - don’t.
Because - setting aside who was made whole in the bailout - while the intended message is supposed to say ‘hey, look at all this money spent on conservation’, what it actually does it outline a practically unaffordable interest rate, which will promptly require refinancing.
And - oh boy - Galapagos has required refinancing25.
In fact, it’s almost as though the Debt-for-Nature swap exit strategy… is more swaps26. Until the day comes, of course, where said swaps no longer can be refinanced, and thus, the construct goes bankrupt. Let’s hope that day never comes, because when… sorry, if it does, exactly who will end up owning the collateral?
Anyway, no need to worry. I’m sure Galapagos will be just fine. And - for the record - as will Iwokrama. Because after all, ‘experts’ are on the case.
Since that webpage was last updated, of course, Lovejoy has passed away27. And with that, Iwokrama’s odds probably slightly improved.