Wild West in the Far East

illegal timber trade in the Amur river region

Siberia - for western Europeans, this is everything past the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. But for the Russians Siberia ends at Lake Baikal. What’s past that they call the far east. And this extreme eastern Russia falls more and more under the influence of its booming neighbor, China. Wood is the raw material that almost everything here revolves around. Wood that the economic wonder newcomer to the south doesn’t have and that stands in abundance all around, hardly used, in their northern neighbor’s forests. The market booms - above all the black market. The Amur river region can be counted today among the regions most seriously exploited by illegal timber cutting in the world.

Over the last seven years, China has increased the import of Russian wood products by more than ten times, thereby relegating the longstanding biggest importers of Russian timber - Japan and Finnland - to second and third place. The trend continues and there is no end to be seen in the skyrocketing economic growth in the “Middle Kingdom.”

Russia also belongs among the countries with strongly growing economies. But this growth is coming for the most part elsewhere, further west, in the European part of Russia, thanks most of all to the oil and natural gas industry in western Siberia. In the Russian far east there is not much sign of it. Unemployment is high. Whoever can leaves for the west.

And so China’s unrestrained timber needs meet here - on the other side of the Amur and Ussuri - with a region with a seemingly immeasurable wealth of timber and a rural population that gets to experience the slowly rising standard of living in Russia only through the never-ending advertisements on radio and television. Unemployment, insufficient unemployment compensation, a wealth of natural resources and then the lure of Chinese businessmen’s money - that is the ideal mix in which corruption and an underground Mafia economy thrive. Unlicensed timber cutting and spiriting the spoils over the border have in the meantime developed into a lucrative sector of the economy - and even if illegal, nonetheless of an economic significance not to be ignored.

Impressions from the Krasnoyarmeisk District, Primorsk Region

Probably it’s only two percent of the population that - armed with their Husqvarna saws, a small tractor and a truck with a crane - goes off into the woods for a nighttime harvest, estimates Viktor Alexeyevich Podkuyko. He is an independent landholder not far from the district government seat Novokoprovka, and runs in addition the Agricultural Department in Krasnoyarmeisk, the third largest district in the Primorsk region, the southeastern corner of Russia. He even knows some of these night shift workers - in part since school days, some also as neighbors. A single team can earn $1500 a night. Lots of money, that thus comes into the region and then funds another twenty percent of the population - from illegal middlemen to legal discotheque operators. Too much money, insists Viktor, since it makes prices rise all around and thus makes life that much more difficult for the rest of the population.

In neighboring Roshchino, cutting and transport certificates are supposed to be had without difficulty, still blank, but already stamped with the seal of the forest service. You have to hand over $300 for these papers. But once filled out, they make every timber shipment legal. When these kinds of documents are not to be had, it costs at least as much to grease the palms of the militia at the highway control points. With higher value ash and poplar it can even be as much as $500. The whole affair is usually taken care of by a sort of advance scout. He goes in front, and only when everything with the militia is “arranged” the timber truck is alerted and then simply waved through by the control post. The timber ends up in giant timber yards that Chinese import companies have set up on the Russian side near the border town of Dalnereshensk. From there - mixed with legal timber and with an appropriately worded customs declaration - it goes off over the border.

A few, but huge timber companies exploited the last old-growth forests in the pacific near regions

“They are making my prices kaput, those illegal timber cutters,” says Vladimir Koslov, a private timber mill owner in Roshchino and lessor of 50,000 hectares of forest. “First they steal logs out of my legal cutting areas, and then they depress the value of my wood with their black market prices.” “Energia” he proudly named his timber mill, built 13 years ago with his own hands. Currently he is in the process of rebuilding his second production building. It was burned down. Was it deliberately burned down? He answers this question with only a shrug of his shoulders.

Developments in his business are symptomatic for this border area. “Russia was here, and Russia will always be here.” So it still defiantly says on the front of his mill. But even he himself does not believe this so much anymore. The whole production - whether raw logs or milled lumber - goes without exception to China. In the meantime, twenty Chinese “guest workers” work at his saws. If the legal fines for failing to employ Russian workers were not so high, he would hire even more Chinese, since they, so he says, work harder, more reliably and more cheaply than his own countrymen.

But even he himself is no longer master of his own house. Some time ago he had to take on a Chinese investor as a partner is his business - along with an assistant, who has installed himself permanently on the mill property. “Russia was here, and China will have taken over here in twenty years” - that is more likely what Vladimir Koslov has in reality come to believe.

The laws against illegal timber cutters are too lax. This is not just mill owner Koslov’s opinion - everyone you ask says this. And many things suggest that things are just going to be that way, that they even have to be that way. Because state support for the unemployed is not enough to live on. And even the regular salary for civil servants is lower than a minimum subsistence wage. Illegal moonlighting is a matter of survival and therefore more-or-less planned on by the state. This is the only way to more-or-less keep the peace.

Even among those who are supposed to be bringing an end to illegal goings on in the forests it’s no different. Victoria K., who occasionally helps out at Viktor and his wife Tatyana’s business, knows this well. Her husband is one of the state-appointed rangers who are supposed to be putting a stop to the activities of poachers and timber thieves. These foresters are themselves allowed to hunt to supplement their much too meager salary. How many wild boar and deer they are allowed to bring down for their own personal use is exactly specified. But who’s going to be watching that closely?

And the rangers venture out after the illegal timber cutters only very unwillingly. That’s too risky, since these for the most part well organized groups reach for their guns quickly to hang on to their lucrative business. So the foresters would rather nab poachers - mostly harmless individuals or small groups that want to hunt down meat for the family dinner or a little extra money. With flagrant poaching violators they can - unlike with timber thieves - collect the fines directly. And that the rangers really turn all this money over to their authorities no one here believes.

The timber gangs work mostly at night, more and more often with silencer saws. So that things can go faster, they take trees that stand not too far away from the forest roads. And they fell, of course - if you’re going to do it, do it right - the highest value trees, from which they then also cut out only the most lucrative part of the trunk and cart it off. Three quarters of the felled tree stays in the woods. Korean pine, Manchurian ash, Mongolian oak, Japanese elm - trees which timber operations working legally in the area had to leave standing, gnashing their teeth, in order not to run up against protection and sustainability laws - they now become the spoils of the illegal timber cutters. The Amur poplar is already supposed to be becoming scarcer. This is the feeling above all among the numerous beekeepers in the area, who fear for their beloved poplar-blossom honey.

The system of illegality, corruption and black market economy has the region firmly in its grip. The existence of entire towns hangs on the lifeline of Mafia wood traffickers. Stricter laws and controls alone will hardly be able to change anything about it. Undoubtedly more effective would be building up a timber industry that didn’t just export the trunk - raw or cut into boards - but itself produced everything all the way to chests of drawers for the Chinese living room. That would keep all the profits that could come from felled trees in the region, and create many and more permanent jobs. And that would significantly reduce the pressure to get involved in illegal moonlighting.

The legal forest killers

But the illegal timber cutting armies are not the only forest killers in the region. They are probably not even the biggest danger for the still seemingly unending forests, in which the last four hundred Siberian tigers have so far been able to survive. Because the timber thieves can only “operate” effectively where the forest has already been opened up - where they can get to their plunder quickly on forest roads, and come back again fully loaded. Ancient forests far from any infrastructure are not their field of operation. They need a forest that has already been opened up and exploited by officially licensed forest industry - mostly still forests opened up by Soviet-era state forestry operations.

the illegal timber cutters are making the prices kaput

The forests in the Primorsk region have been exploited in high style for already over seventy years. Only about a quarter of the forests here are not yet cut through with roads and still remain in their original state. These old-growth forests are located above all at higher elevations and along the difficult to access west flank of the Sikhote-Alin mountains that run through the entire area. The work opening up these areas has, however, already been underway for some time, pushed forwards by a few, but huge timber companies: foreign companies or enterprises with strong foreign participation.

The first, which leased large timber tracts in a joint venture with Russian enterprises right after the economic opening of Russia, was the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai. They were allowed to cut down and ship, unprocessed to Japan, 200,000 cubic meters of timber there yearly. But when the company was forbidden by the high courts to expand their leasing area into the untouched Bikin valley, thanks to the longstanding protests of the Udege peoples living there, Hyundai lost interest and pulled themselves out of this business completely at the end of the nineties.

Further north, in the immediately adjacent Khabarovsk region, the Malaysian multinational Rimbunan Hijau International has been cutting since 1999. This concession - also right in the middle of the Siberian tiger area - is, at 550,000 cubic meters yearly harvest, more than twice as big as Hyundai’s. From the beginning this company has been trying to get permission to build a road through the still completely untouched Samarga valley, to get immediate access to ports on the Sea of Japan.

And the deal with the road is likely to go through pretty soon. Because Terneiles, the biggest timber company in the area, originating out of the Soviet-era state timber operations and richly supplied with capital by their principle client, the Japanese enterprise Sumitomo, got a concession for exactly this untouched Samarga region in 2001. Maximum yearly cut: 800,000 cubic meters. Since then it has taken three years, until the business, with improvements in the management plan, with negotiations and with agreements, had broken the resistance from environmental organizations and the Udege population living right in the middle of the area to the point where they now are going to begin the timber cut. In November [2004] the Terneiles timber operation even got FSC [Forest Stewardship Council] certification - to the unbelieving astonishment of Russian environmental organizations, since this certification still stands for socially and environmentally exemplary forest management.

But whether or not with the FSC seal, the days of the Samarga wilderness are numbered. Highways and forest roads are being built. And on these roads and highways the illegal forest exploiters will later follow the legal exploiters and get their ruthless gleanings.

An epilog

Sawmill owner Vladimir Koslov is dead. They found him at the beginning of December, beaten and with bullet wounds in the head and chest. The murderers are so far unknown, the background unelucidated. A connection with the district elections in January is, however, presumed - elections in which Koslov supported the incumbent district chief, Andrei Kaverzin, a holdover from the Soviet period. Six further candidates had put themselves on the ballot for the job, four of them were so-called “biznesmen,” that is, businessmen who in the currently ruling wildeast capitalism came into big money and now want to ensure themselves political power. Kaverzin, who had tried to block the illegal timber business in every possible way during his time in office, lost the first round of votes to one of these dubious businessmen, the timber dealer Sulla. But in the second ballot Sulla teamed up with one of the rejected candidates, for many clearly a representative of the timber Mafia - and Kaverzin won the election.

Rudolf Fenner is forestry resource person with Robin Wood and German representative in the Taiga Rescue Network International Reference Group (TRN, www.taigarescue.org). The main topic at the 7th international meeting of the TRN in Vladivostok was the forests in the Russian far east. Rudolf Fenner can be reached at: Tel.: 040/38089211, wald@robinwood.de

More information on illegal timber cutting and timber trade in Siberia: http://new.forestsmonitor.org/capacityBuildingInRussia/index.htm

English translation © 2005 Peter D. Hays