Sources tell us that only those who have signed co-management agreements were invited, so community-based organizations and those who manage private protected areas weren't there. And many NGOs aren't happy with the direction the changes are going. Today we asked the Minister of Sustainable Development about it.

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"PACT has traditionally done a lot of work in grants but you can't continue with only grants, there has to be an investment strategy so that PACT came move forward but also so that you can have the membership and the stakeholders who get these funding to be able to do something with the grant but also when it's from outside because basically what PACT does, the funding that they give is not enough for doing the work that the conservation groups do so it certainly assists in leveraging so that you can get monies from private sector and organizations whether local or foreign and so there's a consultation investment strategy within PACT now, I think it's CIS2 where you have a portion of grants but you also have some investments, some monies that go towards payments possibly for rangers and other equipment like fire equipment and everything else so they might not be comfortable with the percentage of grants versus the investment on the other side and so that is something we have to work out with them."

Courtney Menzies:
"Will funding for APAMO be discontinued?"

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"No, we haven't spoken about discontinuing funding for APAMO. I think they had requested some additional funding which the board has to look at it to see if its within the reach of PACT to assist with additional funding but in the ten years as I recall, APAMO as an umbrella organization has received about 10.5% of the total funding in the last ten years and as a group, all the membership has received close to 70% of the total investment monies from PACT so they have gotten quite a bit."