This article was originally published in Portuguese by Agência Pública on October 16, 2024.
Translated from Portuguese by Liam Anderson
In the center of the village is a football field. Around it, in nicely painted wood, are the main community buildings of the roughly 1,000 Kapohn Indigenous people who live on the banks of the Kako River, in an area of preserved Amazonian forest less than 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from the Guyanese-Venezuelan border. Near the church and next to the health care center, the village’s newest development stands out in fresh, light green paint: a mall, or, maybe more accurately, a shed of shops.
Andy’s Mall is the result of the first payment made by Guyana’s government to the Indigenous people of the Kako area, who are proud to say that they were the last to give in and sign the contract with the government that determined the conversion of their forests into carbon credits, sold to the Hess Corporation, an American oil company. This comes after Exxon Mobil’s discovery of massive deposits of offshore oil in Guyana in 2015, generating some $3.5 billion in earnings for the country since production began in 2019. Guyana is now the third largest per-capital producer of oil in the world.
The sale of the first batch of carbon credits issued by the country for the deforestation avoided between 2016 and 2020 was completed in 2022 and made international headlines. The move made Guyana the first country in the world in which credits issued on a national scale and managed by a government body, known in the sector as “jurisdictional credits,” were available to be sold on the private market.
Almost 100 percent of the forest area of the small South American country was included in the negotiations. Combining public forests and Indigenous peoples’ forests in the same package, the government certified and issued credits for Guyana's approximately 18.4 million hectares (45.4 million acres) of forest. The sale of the first batch of 30 percent of the credits was brought in 2022 for $150 million.
According to Guyana's president, Irfaan Ali, Indigenous peoples legally hold 16.4 percent ownership of the country’s territory. This figure is slightly higher than the 15 percent that Predeepa Bholanath, an environmental economist and official with the government’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LDCS) estimated, and includes lands still in the process of having their titles made official. Based on these figures, Bholanath explained, the government calculated that 15 percent of the amount paid by the Hess Corporation should go to Guyana's Indigenous peoples.
In the months following the signing of the first sale of credits to the oil company, each village received a share of the payment according to its number of residents. Additionally, in 2023, $22.3 million was transferred to these communities. All officially recognized villages have signed letters of accession to the program as a condition for accessing the funds.
In March 2023, Kako village received $114,000 from the Guyanese government. As with the other 241 villages in the country, the government set up a bank account in the cacique's (community leader’s) name and informed them that the payment could be withdrawn upon the approval of a sustainability plan. “They gave us a week to decide what to do with the carbon money, to deliver a plan. I thought a mall would be a good idea for our young people,” said Kathleen Andrews, a retired teacher who sits on Kako's leadership council. “Everybody wants to own their first business.”
Built to house 12 shops, the development has yet to catch on. When Agência Pública visited Kako in mid-July 2024, only one shop was operating. Selling cassava bread, snacks, and cleaning products, the Indigenous woman who was running the shop said she serves two or three customers a day.
Seven months after the inauguration, Kathleen lamented: “Now we see that our idea of building a mall benefited only one person: the builder.”
"We Were Forced to Sign"
Bholanath, who coordinates carbon negotiations along with Guyana’s former president Bharrat Jagdeo, who created the initiative, said that none of the villages disagreed with the terms or opted to not receive the money. “If that were the case, well, the difference is that the money would stay in the cacique's account without them withdrawing it,” she said, “because the government was going to deposit the money anyway.”
Mario Hastings, who was Kako’s cacique at the time, disagreed. He says they felt like there was no choice, and even though the majority of the caciques on the National Toshaos Council (NTC) adhered to the project, they were forced to sign it. His vote at the council was a losing one in the discussion about the carbon project.
The construction of the almost inactive mall shows that, without the participation of Indigenous people with guidance and time to develop these projects, the real results fall far short of the aims of developing self-sustaining projects. After all, the Indigenous people of Kako followed the government's guidelines in preparing the annual sustainable development plan that resulted in Andy’s Mall, which is similar to what happened in Guyana’s other 241 villages. Some invested in the construction of business centers, others in infrastructure to host tourists, and others in equipment for growing crops.
Traveling along the Mazaruni and Kako Rivers in western Guyana’s Essequibo Territory, known for an ongoing territorial dispute with Venezuela, we interviewed 22 Indigenous people from the region from the Akawaio and Arekuna ethnic groups. All complained about the loss of autonomy over their territories. “As it stands, it's as if the government were the owner of all the land, and it's not,” said Laura George, an Indigenous lawyer who believes that the carbon project is tantamount to a loss of Indigenous control over their lands.
According to the Amerindian Act, legislation from 2006 establishing Indigenous rights in Guyana, populations must be consulted on projects that impact them, and their local council has the power to authorize—or not—certain uses of their lands, such as leasing areas or logging. However, this legislation has gaps, allowing the implementation of government projects in their areas even without the consent of Indigenous people, such as in situations where “large-scale mining is considered in the public interest.”
The Money Comes, but Recognition of Land Rights Does Not
On a hot morning in late July, 47 Kako Indigenous people shared their concerns and anxieties about the carbon credits project. “My question is: why do they give us this percentage [of income] instead of recognizing our traditional ownership rights over the forests that are remaining in Guyana?” one attendee asked.
To this day, the Kapohn people do not have their lands fully registered and protected. In 1991 they obtained a land title, but the document covers only a part of their traditional territory—the part in the vicinity of the current village. The areas used for planting and for traditional housing on the other side of the river, despite being part of their daily life, were not included. “We're not on the map, but the mining concessions are,” another participant at the meeting complained. “If mining goes on like this, how are they going to have any more carbon [credits]?”
In our reporting, we asked the Guyanese government whether the areas deforested by mining are included in the lands connected to the carbon credits that have been commercialized. Bholanath responded that the government uses satellites to map areas degraded by mining and deducts them from the credit count. In the publicly available documents from the project, however, there are no maps that allow you to see exactly which parts of deforested lands have been deducted from the general count.
In the second year of the carbon project, President Ali announced at the national meeting of caciques that the communities will receive the same net amount as the previous year, even though the country has received less for the credits this year ($87 million in total). The Guyanese government decided to keep the same amount as the previous year’s transfer, increasing the percentage of Indigenous shares. The villages will receive 26.7 percent of all the country’s profits from the sale of the credits, according to the government. The majority of the council of the caciques approved of supporting the government project.
But far from the capital, Georgetown, several questions remain unanswered, angering Indigenous people who complain that they have been shut out of the debate over the use of their lands. “The program was never explained to us in detail. The strategy had already been designed by the government, without our input as Indigenous people,” said Alma Marshall of the Kamarang community.
Many also felt that the rush in the project schedule was problematic. “I would like to see how we could create and model a development trajectory that was our own, not just a replica [of somebody else’s],” said Romario Hastings, Kako’s new chief, who was elected in June 2024 to take over the position held by his father for the last two terms.
“We could create a future where, for example, Indigenous knowledge has more value in our communities, in how we build our infrastructure and live our culture,” he reflected. “I know it's a lot. But I think a young man can dream, right?”
Clarissa Levy is a multimedia reporter. At Agência Pública, she produces the podcast Amazônia Sem Lei and hosts the series Pauta Pública. She is the co-author of reports that won first and second place in the Human Rights and Journalism Award (2022) and the Mulher Imprensa Trophy (2021).
