Photo from UNIAN
Exports of sawn timber exceed the country's entire legal production by 75%: 1.2 million cubic meters of illegally-sourced lumber exports every year.
British-based non-governmental organization Earthsight, which examines problems of illegal deforestation around the world, has investigated into illegal logging in Ukraine over the past two years.
The presented results allow tracing the whole chain from illegal cutting of trees in Ukraine to the final consumers of Ukrainian wood products in the EU states, the Ukrainian online newspaper ZN.ua wrote referring a study by Earthsight NGO, titled "Complicit in Corruption. How billion-dollar firms and EU governments are failing Ukraine's forests."
The charges are serious, as well as the consequences of the hush up the situation. During the moratorium on deforestation, the Ukrainian forests are cut and exported bypassing not only the national legislation but also the EU's regulations and certification at such a rate that the timber exports to the EU in four years grew by 75%, exceeding EUR 1 billion reported in 2017. Earthsight estimates that at least 40% of this wood was harvested or traded illegally.
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Over the past two years, Earthsight experts have been investigating illegal logging and timber corruption in Ukraine, interviewed sources from within government and industry, carried out field investigations, trawled through customs records and unearthed hundreds of court documents, and even presented themselves from a non-existent Ukrainian exporter company to reach out to buyers in the European Union. "The experts are primarily concerned with environmental issues, the preservation of forest areas and the pace of their renewal, while we are interested in possible ways out of this situation," the publication wrote.
The Earthsight experts began their study with the debunking of Ukraine's popular myth that deforestation is the work of "black loggers," who under the cover of night illegally chop the Carpathian forests and export wood to other countries along reindeer tracks.
"Our evidence shows that Ukraine's hundreds of SFEs [State Forestry Enterprises] engage in the systematic, deliberate breaching of a wide range of regulations during harvesting. None is more destructive than illegal 'sanitary felling,'" reads the study.
According to the experts, nearly 60% of the harvesting occurs outside the limits established by Ukrainian legislation, mostly in the form of "sanitary felling" justified to prevent the spread of disease.
Even the tightening of the legislation in 2016 did not change the situation. A study commissioned by Earthsight of 18 logging sites across four of the largest timber producing provinces in 2017 found that between 67% and 78% of this harvesting is unjustified and therefore illegal. Extrapolated to a national level, this suggests illegal sanitary felling currently represents 38%-44% of total production and exports. The Earthsight's field studies confirmed these results, and also revealed other types of violations in the logging sector.
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A former chief of the State Agency for Forest Resources of Ukraine, Viktor Sivets, now hiding from the investigation somewhere in Russia, has created a whole scheme for the deliver of timber from "sanitary felling" directly to companies through a network of offshore jurisdictions.
Earthsight analysts claim that the scheme has been in effect since 2011. There is no one to hold liable, as the State Agency for Forest Resources has been without its head since May 2016. SFEs are supposed to offer all of their timber for sale by auction. Even where this requirement is followed, such auctions are commonly corruptly rigged, and much of this wood ends up in the hands of the "shadow sawmillers." An estimated 12,000 unlicensed sawmills process this wood, mostly for export. As a result, exports of sawn timber exceed the country's entire legal production by 75%: 1.2 million cubic meters of illegally-sourced lumber exports every year.
In fact, Ukraine annually sells to other countries 1.2 million cubic meters of lumber materialized from the air that do not exist in any official document. So, if the data of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine is compared to that of the Eurostat on timber deliveries from Ukraine to the EU, the Eurostat's data will consistently exceed the national one by 5% on the average. And it's not a matter of different methodologies. Just a part of the timber appears in the documents only at the stage when it crosses the border of the European Union. It is the EU countries that account for 70% of Ukrainian timber exports. And then researchers debunk another myth about the rigid and unambiguous regulation of Europeans. The EU Timber Regulation, or EUTR, which sets the criteria for exports of timber to the EU market, has been in force in the EU since 2013. The regulations expressly prohibit the importation of timber illegally obtained in the country of origin, and still require that importers conduct legal checks "with due diligence" to minimize the risk of the entry of illegally harvested timber into the EU. The EUTR rules concern both illegally felled, sold or imported timber. Manufacturers are obliged to make sure that the raw materials they have bought were legally received and sold. However, the Earthsight study shows that this law does not work, and timber of illicit origin systematically enters the EU markets.