It started as a dream, a twinkle in the eye of former President Desmond Hoyte fourteen years ago. It may soon come down to earth with a bang. But, could Mickey Mouse be its saviour? Former Director General of the Iwokrama Project, Dr Kathryn Monk, who left the project in March of this year, believes that the funding may be running out for this Utopian ecological scheme set in the North Rupununi of Guyana. The end could come sooner rather than later if the project is unable to get a twenty million pounds endowment fund lifeline up and running soon. The new post-Monk regime at Iwokrama is not despairing though. Yet. Executive Chairman of Iwokrama, Professor Ian Swingland, told the SN that he was still looking for unconventional donors and “I am dealing with the Commonwealth who are not aware nor conscious of the situation or their real responsibility towards this jewel in their crown. We may yet have to call on them for some further help”.

The project has severely downsized in recent months, let all bar one expatriate staff go at the end of their contracts, released many local staff and moved its headquarters from the luxury of Bel Air to more modest offices in Kingston. Running costs have been reduced by two thirds. Yet, today they have just US$375,000 in the bank. Acting Director General Graham Watkins told me: “Iwok-rama went through a metamorphosis from a primarily research based organisation to a dynamic business oriented institute in March 2003.” That may not be enough. They may have to cut back even more deeply.

Iwokrama is one million acres of virgin Amazonian rainforest, given to the world by Guyana, set up to show that development could take place in an ecologically sustainable way whilst taking account of the hopes and wishes of the indigenous communities. It was established with an international board of trustees appointed by the Commonwealth Secretary-General and it set its sights high, designed to be a project of world importance scientifically and ecologically which happened to be situated in Guyana. Today, says Monk, it has become in essence “a national project with an international board”. Sidelined in the order of things. Watkins admits this saying “attention has been re-focused to other parts of the world”.

But Dr Monk is glad to see a supervisory board in place: “When I arrived in 2001, there was not a functioning board and few plans in place for securing future funding post 2002”, she told me over dinner at the Royal Overseas League in London.

Iwokrama had initially been funded for five years and funding for the future was meant to be sorted out at a Marlborough House Conference in London in May 2002. That, sadly, had the opposite of the desired effect. Funds did not flow, they all but dried up “The donors all came together and realised how bad the picture was”, Monk says with hindsight. Their cheque books stayed firmly closed. The effort to get continued funding had been left too late in the day. In her view, she came aboard a ship that was already holed in 2001, now in 2002 the sea was gushing in.

Marlborough House failed to resolve much except that some of the original aid givers - especially a major donor the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) - announced that their pots were now all but empty as far as Iwokrama was concerned. They had new priorities in the likes of newly “liberated” Afghanistan. Some seed money would be given towards developing business plans and setting up the endowment fund (the annual interest from which is meant to cover Iwokrama’s running costs) but definitely not the huge grants of before.

Watkins says the project has up to US$1M coming on stream in this financial year - including US$325,999 in grants and US$120,000 in revenue. The running costs of the project may have been cut but still they amount to US$1.1M this year. Next year, says Watkins, looks brighter with an extra US$320,000 put on revenue through “training and timber revenues”. But some of the US$500,000 in donor money in 2004 may be coming from the Disney Animal Kingdom. It would be richly ironic if Mickey Mouse were to end up bailing out what was set up as a pure Rainforest Utopia by bringing US tourists to sample its delights.

In the longer term, Watkins thinks he might pull it off but “Iwokrama’s survival depends on support from donors and on small grants from our many partners”. They currently include Jacksonville and Philadelphia Zoos.

But if he fails and Iwokrama does fold, or becomes a shadow of its former self, this could prove acutely politically embarrassing for DFID under the current Secretary of State Baroness Valerie Amos who is, of course, Guyanese-born

So, the Endowment Fund is all important. Up to the time of Dr Monk leaving the Project, in March not very much of that necessary twenty million pounds vitally needed was in place. Some had been promised by the European Commission but that had slipped through the timetable net of the EC last year. It may yet come on stream. Few others were forthcoming with funds in London. Many of the original donors, such as the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat were not offering direct funds but help in kind - institutional help - in most cases. Even that though has ground to a near halt

What this empty bowl they brought back from London last year meant immediately for Iwokrama in Guyana was the need for good husbandry to tide them through what they hoped was a short-term crisis. Dr Monk had to make the same money go further; twelve months funds were stretched to cover fifteen months of operation. Projects were allowed to come to their natural conclusion rather than being truncated.

In addition, the old Board of Trustees having lapsed for a variety of personal and professional reasons, the then DG ,Dr Monk, found herself, she says having to find a new chairman and a new board for the Project.

Professor Ian Swingland, who had successfully set up the Durrell Centre at the University of Kent, was her nominee for Chair as was Richard Burge, former Director of the London Zoo for a place on the Board. They were duly appointed later in 2002. Professor Swingland almost immediately decided to take the role of an Executive Chairman and to seize personal control of relations with potential donors, conventional or unconventional. His and Dr Monk’s partnership was not to be a marriage made in Heaven:

“It soon became clear we could not work together” she says ruefully today. Dr Monk left at the end of her two-year contract in March. Partly, she says, to save on salary bills. “I could not justify paying myself a large salary when the project was in trouble”. But it was out of frustration too. At a process of rot that, she says, had set in much earlier.

By the time of her arrival in 2001, the project had been up and running properly for three years following the passing of legislation in the National Assembly in 1996 and after reaching agreement with Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency in 1998. But in that time it had signally failed to “win any PR battles and to win the hearts and minds of the Guyanese”, according to Dr Monk. Some local staff, including a cadre of young Guyanese professionals, were recruited (and mainly, later, “let go”) but there was a constant, in-built and on-going tension between them and the foreign staff on expatriate and tax-free salaries.

There were also basic design flaws in the dual mission of the project. A tension between the scientific and quasi-commercial goals it had been set. Science initially took the van and much of the effort and expenditure was used on mapping the forest, dividing it into workable/non-workable zones, and working out possible uses for any “product”. The Field station at Kurupukari on the Essequibo was built with DFID aid but even that either acted as an alternative HQ to Georgetown or sometimes “as it was weakly managed” she says was just simply ignored by staff.

Commerce, too, was largely ignored until it was too late. They literally beat about the bush for several years. Then they discovered tourism and ranger training. But, one ecotourist swallow does not a summer of revenue make. Few other revenue streams were found. A Business Plan was eventually formulated but only after Dr Monk’s first draft had been rejected by her Board last November. Even today look up the Iwokrama website and under ‘Business Development’ you will find a blank page. It’s a similar story when you call up the page called ‘Achievements’. Symbolic but sad.

Some of the social, rather than pure, scientific, programmes run in the communities of the North Rupunini were very laudable but they had the unfortunate result of skewing the whole project with their insistence of parity of reward for indigenous workers. They have, however, left those communities of the North Rupununi much better equipped to cope in future with the NGOs and their demands.

In Dr Monks’ view, much of Iwokrama’s work when she arrived had “lost focus”. Her task was to regain that at whatever cost. It meant not courting popularity even when forced to “release” a local accountant and an expatriate worker. Those “sackings” led to disquiet among the team. As she puts it: “I had enormous challenges of lack of staff and resources, and board continuity, an unaware complex suite of donors, and lack of time for new proposal preparation, business development etc to get the new money in quickly”. Her successor points to some of his achievements such as setting up two ranger stations at either end of the Forest and ranger patrols along the River but these are small beer when laid alongside the original dreams

Ultimately, when Dr Monk departed, she left with a fondness for Guyana and the Guyanese people and with a heavy heart about Iwokrama and its future but with more than a little pride in her achievements. “I advanced the process, met donor requirements, gave greater shape and a new direction to the Centre, and a new board that has stated expertise in fund-raising”.

If Iwokrama is forced to fold through its foreign-funding tap finally drying up, then the future for this piece of jungle Utopia is unclear.

Nemesis could happen - it might simply be granted as a commercial logging concession to the likes of Barama, or some of its scientific projects may be kept going by small grants (from Disney, from Zoos, from the Darwin Initiative) but the indigenous communities will once again be the losers. Left with much new knowledge of the ecology of the forest and many skills in exploring it but with no outside revenue base for their local economy.

Today, six months later, Dr Monk is seven thousand miles away from the Guyana Shield in the heart of the English Midlands caring for a sick relative. She is exploring, and being offered, new opportunities in conservation projects worldwide. Her personal dreams about Iwokrama shattered and maybe along with them Guyana’s too. But could Disney and Mickey Mouse prove to be their saviours? Watch this space. All million acres of it....