Thousands
of acres of hisy, Greenpeace Russia claimed that the local administration
in the Republic of Karelia was planning to give a small Finnish logger,
Vainionpaa, permission to cut down 3000 acres of old-growth forest
within the designated national park.
While
this was technically legal, the trade with the Finnish loggers ran
counter to declarations that Russia has signed concerning the protectiotoric
forest in Karelia, on the Finnish Russian border, are being threatened
by Finnish loggers, who are getting the wood at a fraction of the
world price while making handsome payoffs to corrupt Russian bureaucrats.
Karelia
is only one of three areas in northern Europe where "oldgrowth"
forests exist and Greenpeace and other environmental onganizations
are fighting to have the whole region declared a national park placed
under the protection of the Unesco World Heritage list.
Pressure
from Finnish and international environmental organizations last year
forced the leading Finnish timber operator Enso to declare a logging
moratorium from the start of this year.
Small
loggers like Vainionpaa, who are outside the Finnish Forest Industries
Federation's control, have stepped in. Vainionpaa is notorious for
leaving a trail of destruction in it's wake, discarding pulp wood
at the logging site and carrying off only the best logs.
The logging
is being carried out with the full support of the Karelian government,
which has given the Finnish contractors permits. The economics minister
of the Karelian republic, Evgenii Senyushkin, claimed the region earned
nearly 400 million pounds from its logging operations in 1995 and
the local government stressed that only the logging of oldgrowth forests
could save the local economy.
Sergei
Tsiplenkov, the co-ordinator of Greenpeace's forest protection campaign,
claimed the Finns were paying rock bottom prices for their timber."We
know that the the Finns are paying from $5 to $12 a cubic metre of
timber, although the wood should be sold for at least $20 a cubic
metre. We know the world price is $50 a cubic metre. The question
is, who profits from this? We know that the trail goes all the way
from the local bosses to Petrozavodsk (the capital of Karelia) to
Moscow."
On tuesday
the Finnish ecological groups Nature League and Earth Friends blocked
Vainionpaa's sawmill in Haukipudas in Finland.
The problem
in Russia is the complete absence of legislation, with bureaucrats
taking large backbanders for issuing the lucrative logging permits.