30% Of Siberian Logging Illegal; Pollution, Insects Take Toll Of Taiga

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KRASNOYARSK, Russia (AFP) - "Illegal logging and controversial business plans have ecologists raising the alarm in Siberia's scenic Krasnoyarsk region, Russia's prime forestry area and vital to a country struggling under massive air pollution.

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"In Russia, up to 30 percent of tree logging is illegal. Depending on the region, the wood then goes to Scandinavian countries or China," said Yevgeny Shvarts of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "They do it quickly, a team of five or six people take a big truck, cut a large area and send the wood to China. It makes a good profit," lamented Galina Kuzmina, deputy head of Krasnoyarsk's forest protection center.

In addition, 2,000 fires last year alone -- most of them due to arson -- and the Siberian bombyx parasite has devastated entire swaths of the region's forest, she said. But the government's new forestry code, which is still being drafted and allows the regions to privatise forest zones, is what troubles Russian ecologists most.

The Russian forest is currently almost entirely managed by the "leskhozes," local forestry administrations, which hand out licences to the lumberjacks and their firms. "After the privatisation experience of the 1990s, public opinion will not stand for privatisation of forests," Shvarts fumed. Environmentalists also fear that the new code would bar millions of Russians from the forests, who make their living by collecting cedar kernels, mushrooms and berries."

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