Russia's Forest Mafia (via WikiLeaks)

Viewing cable 09VLADIVOSTOK5, FOREST MAFIA ADAPTS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

UNCLASSIFIED Consulate Vladivostok
Appears in these articles:
http://www.spiegel.de
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 UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 VLADIVOSTOK 000005

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TAGS: ETRD PREL ECON EAGR RS
SUBJECT: FOREST MAFIA ADAPTS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

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Introduction
------------

¶1. Despite lower demand for wood products due to the global
economic crisis and implementation of the Lacey Act Amendment,
illegal logging in Russia continues at critical levels.
Approximately 70 percent of Russia's forests are concentrated in
the Russian Far East and Siberia in close proximity to China and
other main timber markets in the Asia Pacific Region. Logging
activity and exports increased significantly in 1990s due to the
high demand for timber in those countries. According to the
World Wildlife Fund, official customs documents show that the
volume of timber officially declared and exported from Russia to
China and Japan is at least 20 percent lower than the volume
officially imported by those countries. That difference
accounts for just some of the illegal timber leaving Russia.
Enormous illegal harvests of cedar and other valuable or rare
species have been occurring throughout the region, including
within supposedly protected nature preserves with far reaching
ecological and social impacts.

Increased Tariffs Lead to Greater Illegal Exports
--------------------------------------------- ----

¶2. Legal exports remained high until 2007, when, in order to
encourage domestic reprocessing of Russian timber, the Kremlin
increased export tariffs for round wood to 20 per cent of its
delivery price. The tariff was again increased by 25 per cent
in April 2008. China and Japan remained the main consumers of
wood, though volumes of timber export decreased slightly. As a
result, wood export via Grodekovo, the main railroad customs
point in Primorye, decreased from 7.3 million tons in 2007 to
6.2 million tons of timber in 2008. Moscow had planned to
further increase the tariff to 80 per cent in January 2009 -- a
level that in effect serves as a timber export ban -- but has
postponed its implementation for a year. An environmental
contact of the Consulate stated that though the current
financial crisis has lowered overall demand for wood products,
the proportion of illegally-harvested wood will increase because
of increased export tariffs and declining profitability for
larger, legal logging firms. Demand for hard wood is down, but
demand for soft wood, like pine, is up. Pine nuts are a source
of sustenance for wild boar, which are in turn a food source for
predators like leopards and tigers.

Poaching Occurs Throughout the Russian Far East
--------------------------------------------- --

¶3. Illegal logging is generally concentrated in border areas,
where it is less expensive to ship wood to processing facilities
in China. The largest illegal cutting operations in Russia are
located in the areas of the Russian Far East and Siberia
neighboring China. Primorye is a leading area for illicit
cutting, but numerous illegal operations have been discovered in
Khabarovsk Krai, and Amur and Jewish Autonomous Oblasts in 2008.
In summer 2008 authorities discovered a poaching operation in
the Dalnerechensk district north of Vladivostok that had
illegally clear cut over 2,300 cubic meters of timber including
1,500 cubic meters of Korean Cedar. That endangered species is
very popular in China for furniture and the pine nuts provide
important sustenance for regional fauna.

¶4. In 2008, Oleg Mitvol, former Director of Rosprirodnadzor
(Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources)
reported numerous timber industry violations in Amur Oblast.
Investigators found documentation stating that 6,000 cubic
meters of timber was officially harvested in the oblast's
Shimanovsk district, but railroad documents recorded 56,000
cubic meters of timber shipped from the district over the same
period.

How It's Done
-------------

¶5. Smugglers use various ways to illicitly export illegal
timber, most of which are able to pass through customs
inspections and established border crossings using fake
documents and fraudulent declarations. Often companies mix
illegally harvested wood into shipments of legally procured
product. They also make customs declarations passing off
valuable and prohibited species as low-value, legal timber.
Smugglers of course also resort to clandestine export without
documents and through unguarded areas of the border. In early
January, authorities caught a Chinese company attempting to
export 4,000 cubic meters of oak and ash valued at 2 million
dollars from Primorye using fake export documents.

¶6. Illegal export often involves corruption and complicity by
the authorities. Two officers from the Khabarovsk Regional
Service for Economic Crimes who were detained in spring 2007
were eventually found guilty of abuse of office while aiding
Chinese and Russian logging companies in illegally harvesting

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and exporting Russian timber. Though it is a positive sign that
officials were found guilty of corruption, their penalty was
light -- in early 2008, their sentences were suspended and they
were released, though guidelines allowed for prison terms of up
to ten years.

Rangers and Citizens Demand Help to Fight Poachers
--------------------------------------------- -----

¶7. Last year, a group of 38 Primorye park rangers and
environmentalists sent a petition to Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin asking him to transfer management the region's forests
from Primorye authorities to the Federal Forestry Agency. The
signatories asserted that the regional government is
consistently failing to fulfill its responsibility to prevent
illegal logging. Although a new Federal Forest Code came into
effect in January 2007 requiring regional authorities to protect
woodlands, Primorye officials have yet to create and adequately
fund an effective forest management system. Residents
frustrated by inaction have staged protests to attract attention
to illegal logging and have even tried to take forest protection
into their own hands. The World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Russian
Far East branch and other environmental organizations often lend
support.

¶8. In summer 2008, residents of a village north of Vladivostok
staged a protest against officially-approved "sanitary cutting,"
when logging companies harvest dead trees and clean woodlands
after wildfires. According to villagers, loggers instead clear
cut everything, including healthy trees and left behind
wastelands in place of viable forests. Loggers have taken
advantage of the fact that forest rangers, suffering from a lack
of regional funding, have drastically reduced staff and
curtailed patrols.

¶9. Loggers are reportedly now setting their sights on 22,000
hectares of premium restricted forest in Pozharskiy Rayon.
Setting a dangerous precedent, authorities issued three permits
in 2007 to cut 5,600 cubic meters of timber after a seasonal
wildfire had occurred. In the wake of this year's spring
wildfires authorities increased the quota to 20,000 cubic meters
in order to "clean up" the area. Local villagers suspect that
most of that quota will come from perfectly healthy trees
unaffected by fire. xxxxx, told the Consulate
Econ section that he suspected loggers may set fire to woodlands
in order to obtain permission to log the areas afterward. He
affirmed that environmentalists are ready to support villagers
in protecting the forests.

Retribution Against Environmentalists
-------------------------------------

¶10. This past winter, unknown perpetrators set ablaze the house
of Yuriy Bersenev, a WWF project coordinator who works to
safeguard protected nature reserves. Two earlier attempts to
threaten or endanger WWF staff, including another case of arson,
occurred last month in the village of Novaya Moskva in
southeastern Primorye. According to WWF and nature preserve
workers, the local "Forest Mafia" -- a band of people engaged in
illegal timber cutting -- has openly declared war on those
working to preserve forests and enforce environmental laws.
Bersenev said the escalation is a result of the weakness of
national forest legislation and rampant corruption in the
Russian Far East. The perpetrators of both cases remain
unknown.

Villagers Suffer in More Ways than One
--------------------------------------

¶11. Along with dealing with the effects of illegal logging,
honest villagers also face trouble following local laws
themselves. For example, when large logging companies own the
rights to forests nearby, villagers are often forced to travel
twenty kilometers or more to legally gather firewood for their
own subsistence. Such a story was confirmed by the Consul
General during his visit to the remote town of Krasny Yar, an
eleven hour drive from Vladivostok. The town is surrounded by
birch, cedar, and pine forest, but residents are prohibited from
gathering wood nearby.

Lack of Jobs Leads to Poaching
------------------------------

¶12. Many villages throughout the region were originally
established as logging towns during the Soviet era. Legitimate
job opportunities have dwindled since then, and the current
global financial crisis has made life there even more difficult.
Many of the jobless former-loggers have resorted to
smaller-scale, ad-hoc -- and illegal -- harvesting of wood.
Providing their services to the "Forest Mafia" is often their
only source of income. With the drop in industrial production

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over the border in China, the price of a cubic meter of spruce
has dropped from 120 USD to 60. Established companies are often
finding it more profitable to use the services of these
out-of-work villagers cutting down trees in unauthorized areas
than to use legal, established channels.

Conclusion
----------

¶13. According to xxxxx expert xxxxx 50 percent of soft wood
and 90 percent of hardwood harvested in the Russian Far East and
Siberia eventually ends up in the US as finished goods after
being processed in China. The Lacey Act Amendment, which
requires documentation that wood products sold in the U.S. were
obtained legally and sustainably, may help stem the flow of
illegal timber coming from the Russian Far East. Post would
welcome and be happy to assist NGO's or USG experts who could
provide timber companies with briefings on the Lacey Act
Amendment and the implications for wood products originating in
Russia.
Armbruster

Will Obama allow BP to drill offshore in Arctic?

As usual, Obama Administration is doing far too little to protect the environment.

In just 40 years oceans could be empty of fish

RawStory (h/t tenpercent)

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.

The unbelievable madness of it all is that a lot of the overfishing is subsidized by governments and would not otherwise be economical.  That's certainly been the case with Japanese whaling. 

A gorilla friend is a friend for life

Dead fish pile up on beach following Gulf of Mexico oil spill

J Dar Tulane, the individual who posted this video on May 12, writes:

"These are the first round of dying/dead fish off the gulf coast in Louisiana. We had to sneak passed Coast Guard guards and eventually were asked to leave when ATV riders drove passed. Literally the entire beach had little piles of these dead fish that the tide had washed in. Most were small flounder like fish but some were pretty huge. Pictures to come."

Jotman has posted the "mother of all" oil spill timelines here.

Jeremy Jackson on overfishing

ESA Satellite view of Loop Current

The fear is that winds could push the oil slick south until it joins the Loop Current, which would carry the oil towards Florida. If that were to happen, the oil could flow into the Gulf Stream and be carried up to the US East Coast. - ESA

America's meek environmental groups

Happy Earth Day!   Some thoughts about the American environmental movement.

UK Chagos Islands: world's largest marine park

BBC (hat-tip Tenpercent) reports:

The UK government has designated an area around the Chagos Islands as the world’s largest marine reserve. The reserve would cover a 544,000 sq km area around the Indian Ocean archipelago, regarded as one of the world’s richest marine ecosystems. This will include a “no-take” marine reserve where commercial fishing will be banned.

But islanders, who live in exile, have expressed concern that a reserve may in effect ban them from returning. The islands are known for their clean waters and unspoilt corals. Conservationists say the islands possess up to half the healthy reefs in the Indian Ocean. However, Chagossians have said the protected zone could prevent them from fishing – their main livelihood.

The former residents, who were evicted from the British overseas territory between 1967 and 1971 to make way for a US Air Force base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, have fought a long-running battle in the UK courts for the right to return.

Wikipedia describes  the territory of the Chagos as twice the size of the UK's land surface:

The Chagos group is a combination of different coralline structures topping a submarine ridge running southwards across the centre of the Indian Ocean, formed by volcanoes above the Réunion hotspot. Unlike in the Maldives there is not a clearly discernible pattern of arrayed atolls, which makes the whole archipelago look somewhat chaotic. Most of the coralline structures of the Chagos are submerged reefs.

The Chagos contain the world’s largest coral atoll and the greatest marine biodiversity in the UK by far. It also has one of the healthiest reef systems in the cleanest waters in the world, supporting half the total area of good quality reefs in the Indian Ocean. As a result, the ecosystems of the Chagos have so far proven resilient to climate change and environmental disruptions.

"Stealing a Nation," a 2004 documentary by John Pilger, describes plight of the Chagos people:


Watch Stealing a Nation, a Special Report by John Pilger in Educational  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Obama's offshore drilling anouncement

Obama calculates that his recent give-away to the insurance industry in the guise of health-care reform has won the White House sufficient political capital to capture some additional campaign financing from the oil industry.   The president is walking on thin ice.

More here.

Bird sanctuary in Jordan

I took the photo. It shows an man and his son at a bird sanctuary in Jordan. Sadly, there were hardly any birds.

Bisphenol A in all the oceans?

According to a UN study, one square mile of ocean contains 46 thousand pieces of plastic.  Now, according to a new report, all the oceans contain traces of BPA (Bisphenol A).  Wired:

BPA can cause reproductive disorders in shellfish and crustaceans, and doses below a single part per trillion can have cell-level effects, but the path from water and sand to ocean animals needs to be studied. 

Outcome of UN vote on bluefin

A U.N. meeting about wildlife trade has rejected a proposal to ban the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna. (AP)  More details here.

Species in the Red: Greenpeace list of fish species you should not eat

Greenpeace, to its credit, is finally moving to take the overfishing crisis seriously.  It has publish a "red list" of endangered fish species that should no longer be consumed. 

Treehugger:

Five different criteria were used by Greenpeace to identify species in the ‘red’: first, the status of the fish, whether they are threatened or endangered; second, whether destructive fishing methods are used (such as bottom trawling); third, whether harvesting the fish has negative impact on non-target species through by-catch; fourth, whether fish are caught illegally by unregulated fishing operations (or “pirate fishing”); and fifth, whether the fishery involved negatively impacts on local communities which depend on fishing for their livelihoods.

In addition to the ‘red list’, Greenpeace is also encouraging the designation of 40% of oceans as “no-take” zones (instead of the current 1%) in order to allow fish stocks to recover.

 Here's the Greenpeace list of 22 "in the red" species:

Alaska Pollock

Atlantic Cod or Scrod

Atlantic Halibut (US and Canadian)

Atlantic Salmon (wild and farmed)

Atlantic Sea Scallop

Bluefin tuna

Big Eye Tuna

Chilean Sea Bass (also sold as Patagonia Toothfish)

Greenland Halibut (also sold as Black halibut, Atlantic turbot or Arrowhead flounder)

Grouper (imported to the U.S.)

Hoki (also known as Blue Grenadier)

Monkfish

Ocean Quahog

Orange Roughy

Red Snapper

Redfish (also sold as Ocean Perch)

Sharks

Skates and Rays

South Atlantic Albacore Tuna

Swordfish

Tropical Shrimp (wild and farmed)

Yellowfin Tuna

My question: Why would anyone want to eat some of these fish anyway?  Many of the species on the list contain too many pollutants such as PCBs and mercury (tuna, swordfish) and others have substandard taste and nutritional value because of how they are produced (farmed salmon and tropical shrimp).


It's time for environmental groups to step up campaigns against restaurant chains, distributors, and grocery stores that stock these species.  Distributors of these foods can be targeted.  In regards to the urgent need to step-up this campaign, Greenpeace is off to a late start, but a promising one.

Who will save the bluefin tuna?

If nations can't agree to ban blue fish tuna fishing this week, it may be the end of the line for that species.

From an article about the documentary film End of the Line by Charles Clover in the Times of Malta:

He described one of the most shocking discoveries during his research:

“It was when I realised that the scientific advice was that the bluefin quota in 2007 should be 10,000 tonnes for recovery, 15,000 tonnes to be sustainable. But the EU and ICCAT connived to set it at 29,500 tonnes – and the fishermen caught 61,000 tonnes. At that moment, I realised we were filming something rather like the last buffalo hunt.”

Here's the trailer:

Bluefin tuna: endangered and overfished

UPDATE:  See this post.

This week delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) consider a proposal on the table for a complete ban on international trade of the bluefin tuna to allow stocks to regenerate.   Clearly, the time has come to ban the fishing of bluefish tuna, but a number of countries refuse to act responsibly.  In this post, we are going to name and shame these lousy global citizens.

NPR reports:

. . .. a ban on fishing bluefish tuna, it is necessary because the Atlantic bluefin is a migratory species that swims from the western Atlantic to the Mediterranean — putting it beyond any one country's border.  Compounding the tuna's plight is the growing threat from illegal fishing fleets and the failure of existing measures to keep the population sustainable. Patrick Van Klaveren, a delegate with the Monaco delegation. "With bluefin tuna, it's not a question of 10 or 20 years but five or six years or less to see the stock collapse."

When a fish stock "collapses" it may not come back -- ever.  Just ask a Newfoundland Atlantic Cod fisherman.  Atlantic Cod was plentiful off the Grand Banks until the fishery collapsed in the mid-1990s.

Bluefish tuna is loaded with mercury, so it's a wonder that so many people want to eat the stuff. 

RESPONSIBLE GLOBAL CITIZENS

• Monaco - "the sponsor of the proposed ban on the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna — says numbers have fallen by nearly 75 percent since 1957." (NPR)
• United States - Supporter of the ban
• Eurpean Union - Supporter of the ban

DISGRACEFUL GLOBAL CITIZENS

• China - believed to be opposed to the ban (AP)
• Canada- believed to be opposed to the ban (AP)
• Australia - "backed a weakened proposal at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species that would regulate the trade but not ban it outright." (AP)  
• New Zealand - Ministry of Fisheries wants to increase New Zealand's quota from 420 to 532 tonnes, partly because it was allocated smaller limits than other countries in previous years. (RNZ)
• Peru - backed a weakened proposal
• Spain, Greece and Malta - have significant tuna industries; they oppose the ban.
• Japan - Japanese have proposed that the tuna stocks be managed regionally, an approach conservationists say wouldn't work since the fish cross international borders... Japan won’t comply with a total ban, and would instead prefer a fishing quota....   Japan, meanwhile, hopes to fend off the ban by enlisting the support of developing nations in Africa and Latin America. Tokyo said that even if a ban is implemented, it could use a treaty technicality to opt out of the agreement by expressing “reservations,” and would then continue to import from other countries.   (NPR)  

In Japanese the word for shame or disgrace is chijoku.  

Certain other countries listed above have far smaller tuna fleets than Japan, yet have nevertheless failed to voice unequivocal support for a ban.  Arguably these countries are the most chijoku of all.
____
Illustrations from How to draw a tuna.

Two of the world's biggest icebergs

One of the world's biggest icebergs recently collided with a giant glacier to form another massive iceberg.

The above image was composed by the European Space Agency.  ESA (h/t Antarcticana) explains:

This animation, made up of eight Envisat radar images, shows the 97-km long B-9B iceberg (right) ramming into the Mertz Glacier Tongue in Eastern Antarctica in early February 2010. The collision caused a chunk of the glacier’s tongue to snap off, giving birth to another iceberg nearly as large as B-9B. The new iceberg, named C-28, is roughly 78-km long and 39-km wide, with a surface area of 2500 sq km (the size of Luxembourg). 

Sierra Club's Avatar Sands ad

Wired:

Cameron probably didn't have the Boreal forest in mind when he thought up the plot to Avatar. But it's still a smart move on the part of anti-Tar Sand activists to make such a splashy statement in Variety.

Is the Sierra Club squandering the best environmental metaphor to come along in a generation?

I think it would be preferable were the Avatar theme linked to the fight for global pollution taxes.  Were carbon trading, or some such  policy implemented on a global scale, not appeals to public opinion, but simple economics alone would surely seal the fate of many of the most environmentally unsound forms of energy production.

Carbon emissions impact climate and health

I had assumed this was blatantly obvious, but it appears not:

Writing online Jan. 22 in the journal Environmentahal Research Letters, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Gregory Nemet, Tracey Holloway and Paul Meier report that the value of "co-benefits" — especially improved public health due to better air quality — rarely factors into assessments of climate change policy.

"The debate is really about how expensive this is going to be, and it excludes the social benefit," says Nemet, an assistant professor of public affairs and environmental studies at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. "That hasn't really been part of the equation."

The researchers found that the health benefits of reducing carbon emissions pay for the cost of reducing emissions:

These benefits far outweigh the costs of carbon dioxide mitigation, which currently proposed policies limit to less than $30 per ton.

"At least in the near term — about 10 years in climate change policy — you can actually offset all the costs of climate policy by the benefits you get to human health, including reduced health care costs and improved quality of life from people being healthier and living longer," says Nemet.

Last of Sumatra's Tigers?

A WWF camera trap video shows a whole family of rare Sumatran tigers.

Japanese whaling ship sinks Sea Shepherd boat

ABC has a report on the collision in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese whaling security ship Shonan Maru No. 2 rammed and damaged the Ady Gil, a $2 million high-speed trimaran belonging to Paul Watson's anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Society.

Continued...

US and China must cooperate on the environment

Fallows, who recently spent several years in China, blogs:

Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in 2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad environmental improvement. If they can't....