On the APA, Carbon Financing, Chinese Landing, and FPIC

On the APA, Carbon Financing, Chinese Landing, and FPIC

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar August 2026

Do you remember the narrative that the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) was somehow trying to block climate finance — carbon credits money — from reaching Amerindian communities?

That was never how 592 Guardian  understood the issue. If you understand what Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) actually means, the position becomes much clearer.

When we read APA’s submission to the ART Secretariat at the time, we understood where they were coming from. It was not a position against Indigenous communities receiving funding or benefiting from development. Why would an Indigenous rights organisation want to prevent Indigenous communities from benefiting from resources intended for their development? That interpretation, to 592 Guardian, was absurd — but it certainly supported a political narrative, one the government itself actively cultivated.

Vice President Jagdeo publicly attacked the APA over its complaint; the Guyana Chronicle ran a piece titled “They do not speak for us,” quoting a government-aligned figure accusing APA of the very consent violation it had alleged; and a pro-government outlet later framed APA’s failed appeal as “a failed political attempt to stymie the development of Amerindian Villages,” pointedly noting Guyana earned US$150 million in 2023 ART-TREES payments — as if the size of the payment were itself an answer to the process question APA was asking.

The issue, to our understanding, was how the decision was made, who made it, and whether Indigenous peoples had actually consented to it. And this is where FPIC becomes important.

FPIC is not a mechanism to say “yes” or “no” after everything has already been decided. It is a safeguard for Indigenous self-determination.

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THE SEQUENCE MATTERS

Free, Prior and Informed Consent means consent must come before the decision.

You cannot make the fundamental decisions about a project, program, policy or activity, begin implementing it, and then approach communities afterwards and call that FPIC. That is consultation after the fact. And consultation is not the same thing as consent.

Similarly, you cannot decide that mining concessions should be issued within or affecting Indigenous lands, conduct lotteries, issue concessions and allow activities to commence, and then approach Indigenous communities — as an agency or a miner — afterwards asking whether they consent to mining or entry to mine. By then, a critical decision has already been made. The consent was supposed to come before the decision to permit the activity, not after it.

This is why we have always found the criticism that organizations such as APA are simply “talking about consultation, consultation, consultation” to be somewhat simplistic. APA was attempting to apply FPIC as it is understood as an international standard, rather than treating it as another box to tick after a decision has already been taken.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED WITH THE CARBON CREDITS

This is not an abstract dispute. The documented timeline of Guyana’s ART TREES carbon credit program is, in fact, a textbook case of what FPIC is meant to prevent.

According to the Forest Peoples Program’s case study on the certification — first published on apaguyana.com and drawing directly on APA’s own account — the Government of Guyana submitted its proposal for carbon credit certification to the ART Secretariat in December 2020, before any prior consultation with Indigenous Peoples took place.

The proposal covered carbon credits generated from all forests nationally, including forests on Indigenous Peoples’ titled lands. Government did hold information-sharing sessions on the broader Low Carbon Development Strategy, of which the ART proposal was one component — but per APA and FPP’s account, these sessions did not amount to consultation in the sense required under international human rights law, and no Indigenous Peoples were asked for, or gave, their free, prior and informed consent to the proposal itself.

The National Toshaos Council did endorse the wider LCDS policy framework. But the NTC is not a body empowered to give FPIC on behalf of individual Indigenous communities for a scheme monetising carbon on their specific titled lands — a distinction government has repeatedly treated as immaterial, and one that goes to the heart of what “consent” is supposed to mean under FPIC. Consent is community-specific and land-specific.

A national council endorsing a national strategy is not the same thing as the villages whose titled forests are being sold into a carbon market agreeing to that sale.

Aster Global Environmental Services then conducted the validation and verification for ART’s certification — but its review, per FPP, was structurally limited to assessing government’s own self-reported compliance with the TREES standard, not an independent assessment of whether Indigenous communities had actually consented. ART certified the credits in December 2022. A portion was sold to Hess Corporation.

Only after all of that — the proposal, the endorsement, the validation, the certification, the sale — did APA’s formal complaint arrive, filed with ART’s grievance mechanism in March 2023. And even then, the complaint was dismissed twice: first in May 2023, then again on appeal in October 2023, both times without the Secretariat ever substantively engaging the FPIC question APA had raised. Government’s own framing of that outcome was that APA had failed on procedural grounds — questions about who APA represented, whether APA itself had consent to file.

Whatever the merits of that procedural dismissal, one fact remains: to this day, no independent body has actually adjudicated whether Guyana’s process met the FPIC standard. The complaint was dismissed on threshold grounds, not defeated on the merits.

That is the sequence problem in its purest form. The credits were designed, proposed, endorsed by a body without the authority to consent, validated against government’s own self-reporting, certified, and sold — and only at the very end of that chain was an Indigenous rights organization’s objection even heard, and then dismissed without reaching the substance.

592 Guardian understanding of APA’s position, then and now, was never that Indigenous communities should not receive the benefits of carbon financing. It was that the conditions for consent were never met before the money moved. That is a fundamentally different argument. It is the difference between saying: “Do not give Indigenous communities this funding,” and saying: “Before decisions are made about Indigenous lands and resources, Indigenous communities must have the opportunity to determine whether and how they consent to those decisions.” Those are not the same thing.

CHINESE LANDING

This brings us to mining, and to the standoff currently unfolding at Chinese Landing.

The question there cannot simply be whether the community was eventually consulted before a miner entered their lands with heavy equipment. We have to ask when they were consulted about the decision to mine from the inception, what information they had, what decision had already been made, and whether they actually had the ability to influence or withhold consent before that decision was taken.

The record at Chinese Landing shows exactly this pattern. A 1999 agreement gave the miner permission to work in exchange for tribute, employment and services — but by 2009 the Village Council had refused to renew that agreement and told the miner to cease work and remove his equipment. What followed was over a decade of legal proceedings that never actually resolved whether the village’s consent was required at all: a 2017 CCJ ruling that was narrowly procedural — it struck down a cease-work order on jurisdictional grounds and expressly left undecided whether the Village Council had standing to enforce consent requirements — followed by a 2021 High Court ruling, still on appeal, holding that minerals vest in the state and that the miner did not need village permission to access his permits in the first place.

That 2021 ruling is the sharper and more uncomfortable version of the argument this publication is  making here. It is not merely that consent was sought too late in that case. A court has held, as the law currently stands, that consent was never legally required at all — that the Mining Act’s vesting of minerals in the state overrides the Amerindian Act’s consent provisions. Notably, that reading contradicts an earlier ruling by the very same judge in a different case, where prospecting permits granted before the Amerindian Act’s commencement were held to require consent on renewal — a contradiction that has never been explained and remains unresolved on appeal.

If concessions have already been issued — which is often the case — the process has already moved considerably beyond the point at which consent should have been sought. And if our courts are, in live cases, reading our own laws as not requiring that consent in the first place, then the problem is not simply implementation. It is the law itself.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION

Our existing laws may not fully reflect the FPIC standard. And perhaps that is precisely the uncomfortable conversation we need to have.

If our legal framework allows decisions affecting Indigenous lands to be made first and consent to be sought later — or, as the Chinese Landing litigation suggests, allows those decisions to be made without requiring consent at all — then perhaps the problem is not with the principle of FPIC. Perhaps the problem is that our laws need to catch up with the rights they are supposed to protect.

This is why this publication do not see FPIC as an obstacle to development, nor do we blame the APA for the positions it has held on either carbon financing or mining. What we do find a reasonable and open question is how to practically apply FPIC without jeopardizing Indigenous peoples’ rights in the process — and we believe the NTC and District Councils are trying to address exactly this through the development of FPIC guidelines and protocols.

Good intentions do not remove the requirement for consent. A project can be designed to bring jobs. A program can be designed to bring development. A policy can be designed with the best intentions. But good intentions do not automatically create consent.

FPIC exists precisely because even well-intentioned decisions can undermine Indigenous self-determination when Indigenous peoples are excluded from making those decisions.

SOURCES

Forest Peoples Programme, “ART’s Controversial Certification of Carbon Credits to the Government of Guyana” (29 Feb 2024, first published apaguyana.com); Kaieteur News reporting on APA’s March 2023 ART complaint and government response; Guyana Chronicle, “They do not speak for us” (15 Apr 2023); Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, [2017] CCJ 20 (A.J.); reporting on the 2021 High Court ruling and pending Court of Appeal proceedings; IACHR Precautionary Measures No. 196-23.

— The Board