The scale of the felling of the Russian taiga by the Chinese

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Russians believe that the Chinese are predatory cutting down our forest. In fact, this is not entirely true: they only do what our authorities allow them.

Light smoke rises over the industrial area

“Again the Chinese are burning something. Everything that you see on the left side, the whole forest, it is them, their sawmills, "- the general director of the enterprise" Massiv "Alexey Zhigachev takes us in his" Ford "through the industrial zone and leads a tour. The town of Kansk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, is almost the center of Russia: more than four thousand kilometers to Moscow and about five thousand to Vladivostok.

Everywhere - logs, stacks of logs. For a few minutes we drive along a wall of logs as high as a two-story house. Then the next sawmill.

Alexey Zhigachev is from St. Petersburg, and has been in the harsh Siberian forestry business since the early nineties. He does not hide his dislike for the Chinese: “There were stoves there, a chimney sticking out of every window, they lived. People are unpretentious, - and unexpectedly develops the idea, - but in general, I think this is their state program to seize Russian territory."

We are entering the territory of the "Array". According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, this sawmill belongs to Russian businessman Vladimir Baryshnikov. What is surprising: as a rule, the owners of sawmills in Kansk are citizens of the PRC.

It is fashionable to talk about Chinese forest expansion even at the federal level. The head of the Ministry of Natural Resources Dmitry Kobylkin, speaking in November 2018 at the Federation Council, described his dialogue with the “Chinese minister”: “I told the minister one simple thing: (…) China, we will close the export of timber entirely to China. His [Chinese minister's] face changed so much that I simply did not expect."

Is the Chinese threat really looming over the Russian taiga?

Under the Chinese

Kansk is the capital of sawmills. Almost 200 sawmills operate in the city with a population of less than 100 thousand people, this is the largest employer, says ex-mayor Nadezhda Kachan.

Taiga is cut in the north, a few hundred kilometers from Kansk, logs are transported here by timber trucks or by rail, here they are turned into lumber and loaded onto the Trans-Siberian Railway. The invoices often include the Zabaikalsk station, the border crossing with China. It is China that is the largest buyer of both sawn timber and Russian round timber (that is, logs).

The boom of sawmills - all over Siberia - began in the middle of the 2000s, recalls Aleksey Zhigachev. Prior to that, Russia was exporting "round timber" (logs), and on a fantastic scale. For example, in 2006 she sent 51 million cubic meters abroad. To understand: firstly, it was a third of the total cut down forest; secondly, the closest competitor, the USA, shipped 10 million cubic meters in the same year, five times less.

Then the critical situation was finally noticed by the Russian authorities. They partially banned the export of round timber. “Large purveyors have export contracts, and quotas are allocated for them. Small and medium-sized quotas do not have, in fact, protective duties are in effect for them,”Zhigachev explains. In part, this policy worked, in 2016 (the latest available data from the FAO - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), Russia exported only 20 million cubic meters of "round timber", and the closest competitor - New Zealand - 16 million.

But deep processing of wood - as the officials promised - did not happen either. The industry settled on an intermediate option - lumber, the primary, most primitive product. There are no protective duties on it.

Sawmills began to appear everywhere: in railway dead ends and industrial zones, practically in an open field, unpretentious band sawmills were erected under a canopy, says another Siberian businessman. This boom reached Kansk with a delay: in 2015, only 37 sawmills operated in the city, mostly with Russian owners, and now almost 200, most of them belong to the Chinese, emphasizes the former mayor Nadezhda Kachan.

… The shop near Zhigachev is very noisy and smells delicious of fresh wood. The crane delivers the log to the workshop, it drives through the sawmills, turning into a neat stack of boards. Workers stack the boards by hand. The company employs about 80 people. Only a fifth of the production goes to the Russian market, the rest goes to Germany and Turkey. The equipment is noisy, old and has been in service for almost 20 years. And before being transported to Russia, she managed to work at an Austrian sawmill. “Of course, these are all technologies of the 70s of the last century,” Zhigachev is sad.

The Chinese have more modern equipment and often have higher wages. In general, they bypass Russian business in many ways. Especially hit on the sick - the purchase of a forest. With the influx of Chinese money, the lumberjacks had an appetite. So, Zhigachev's enterprise, in order to stay afloat, must buy larch no more than 5 thousand rubles per cubic meter. And Chinese businessmen are offering 7-8 thousand. Zhigachev survives only due to the fact that his company has leased allotments in the taiga for felling.

By the way, in the forest itself - contrary to popular belief - there are no Chinese.

As a rule, Russians operate there. But there are nuances. So, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, felling begins in August, explains Zhigachev. Lumberjacks are repairing equipment, throwing people and cars into the taiga. The logs lie in the so-called upper warehouses for several months, the export and sale begins only in December, when the winter roads freeze. It is hard for lumberjacks to survive this financial gap; banks are reluctant to lend to the industry - through and through "gray". Then the Chinese are in a hurry to help: they finance the procurement, give advances. “Therefore, small and medium-sized firms, they all slowly fall under the Chinese,” says Zhigachev.

“They buy sawmills, crush loggers - creeping economic expansion is taking place everywhere,” sums up another Siberian businessman who has been sending timber for export from the Taishet station of the Irkutsk region for many years.

Guys in the forest

"When will black deforestation stop, when will the state put things in order here?" - Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko at a November meeting under the cameras scolds the Minister of Nature Dmitry Kobylkin.

The claim to the newly minted minister is rather strange. The state has not been able to put things in order here since the 1990s. The forest industry is gray, opaque, but simply criminal. “In Taishet, lumberjacks are just men who brought in timber trucks, unloaded them, received black cash and dumped them. Where they cut down this forest, only God knows. Documents, invoices, “laundering” - all this happened later, through a chain of legal entities,”says an entrepreneur from Taishet.

Historically, the forestry industry has been little consolidated, this pie is not divided among the major players, like other raw materials sectors, especially oil and gas. According to Rosleskhoz data for 2017, the largest companies (Ilim Group, Mondi Syktyvkarsky LPK, Kraslesinvest) accounted for only 10% of the maximum allowable logging volume. And small players prefer to work as in the 1990s - with a cache, left-handed documents, no one even thinks about reforestation.

From time to time the security forces carry out special operations against black lumberjacks. Here, for example, footage from the same Krasnoyarsk taiga.

The brave fighters of the Russian Guard run out of the helicopter, burst into the carriages, detain illegal immigrants along with the equipment.

But, alas, often high-profile stories end in zilch. For example, in August 2013, the Interior Ministry detained an international group of smugglers. Five entrepreneurs bought timber from black lumberjacks, “laundered” it (by fictitious resale through a chain of companies, the last of which is the cleanest) and sent it to China. The damage from smuggling was initially estimated at 2 billion rubles. So, the company "Sibtrade", the last in the chain, in October 2010 alone was going to send 100 wagons of timber, follows from the database of arbitration cases.

But then the case suddenly "dried up". When the Prosecutor General's Office sent the materials to court in 2015, the damage from smuggling was already estimated at 90 million rubles. One of the defendants, Olesya Mulchak, was not arrested by the court at all. After the story with the forest, the woman headed the AquaSib company for a long time, building a plant for bottling drinking water from Lake Baikal for export to China. On the website of the Trans-Baikal Regional Court, it is impossible to find information about the time frame for the rest of the defendants. But according to Irkutsk environmental activists, a smuggler, Chinese Sun Zhenjun, Mulchak's husband, has long been at large (we could not verify this information, Mulchak refused to talk to us).

However, the situation in the taiga does not look completely dire. As can be seen from the FAO statistics, the peak of felling fell on the Soviet era: in 1987-1990, the harvesting of commercial timber amounted to 305 million cubic meters per year. Now - 198 million cubic meters. Even taking into account illegal logging, there seems to be no reason for panic.

Everything is fine only on paper, says Alexei Yaroshenko, head of the Forestry Department of Greenpeace Russia.

The best and most valuable conifers are sawn. In their place, shrubs and a low-value forest grow. “In many regions, conifers are close to depletion. We see thousands of half-abandoned or abandoned forest villages across the country, which have nothing to earn a living, valuable resources around them have been exhausted. And we, of course, are waiting for new waves of dying of such settlements”, - portrays the gloomy future of Yaroshenko.

In fact, you can really treat the forest in a completely different way. For example, remember that it is a renewable resource. In Finland, another forest country, in 2016 they harvested 62 million cubic meters of commercial timber - against 198 million Russian. But the territory of Finland is 50 times smaller than the Russian one.

“In Russia, the taiga has always been perceived as a deposit of logs, there is no and there was no normal reforestation, a complete imitation. And now this deposit, one might say, is almost exhausted,”Yaroshenko continues.

The taiga topic comes up periodically at the federal level. Most often - as an excuse to talk about the Chinese threat.

Broken snowmobiles

“The best woods were sold and sold to the Chinese for half a percent of the real value,” director Nikita Mikhalkov looks at the camera earnestly, slowly reads out the text and incorrectly names the districts of the Tomsk region. This is another release on the BesogonTV Youtube channel, June 2018. Soon the anti-Chinese agenda will be picked up by the politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. According to him, the Chinese rented timber 200 times cheaper than it should be.

All this noise is around LLC "MIC" Jingye ". The company's 100% subsidiary from Shanghai received five forest plots in the Tomsk region with a total area of 178 thousand hectares, promising to pay about 1.5 billion rubles for 49 years. It turns out from 11 to 20 rubles per hectare per month. It was these figures that angered politicians and show business.

… On the night road there is not a single oncoming car, along the road there are no cafes, no gas stations. It seems that apart from the passengers of our minibus there is not a soul for tens of kilometers. We are going to the Kargasoksky district, the largest and most remote in the Tomsk region. It is 450 kilometers north of the regional center. In summer, after the rains, the road is almost impassable in places, but along the winter road it is good and fast. It is here, in the Kargasok district, that the Jinye MIK took two plots with a total area of almost 90 thousand hectares.

In the village of Kargosok - translated from the language of the indigenous population as "Bear Cape" - the news about the Chinese excited the residents. Local lumberjacks have a much smaller caliber. Ivan Krivosheev is considered an oligarch here. His company "Kurganlesexport" leases 35 thousand hectares. We are meeting with his father, Evgeny Krivosheev, also an entrepreneur. He immediately makes it clear that logging is the lot of the brave and stubborn. The winter road freezes in December, melts and falls in March, the rest of the time instead of roads there are impassable bogs (note, since we are talking about the Vasyugan bogs are the largest in the world). Logs simply cannot be removed from the upper warehouses. The wood is not particularly valuable, on the spot a cubic meter can be taken for 800 rubles, and delivery to Tomsk costs 1500 per cubic meter. Finally, a formidable parasite, the Siberian silkworm, has been raging lately, complains Krivosheev.

“Who’s going to get here? They probably took this lease, paid the money, then grabbed their heads, what to do here? - the entrepreneur asks.

Fears of Mikhalkov and Zhirinovsky about the understated price here can only cause laughter. "Jingye" paid 11-20 rubles per month per hectare, "Kurganlesexport" - 5 rubles. Another of our interlocutors, businessman Anatoly Krivobok, has 25 rubles per hectare, but the allotment is quite close to the village.

The invasion of the Chinese into the Kargasok region never happened. After the noise in the media, the Tomsk official canceled the contracts with Jingye, citing various violations, for example, the late payment of the rent. Over the past year, the Chinese only twice came to the north of the region and once managed to get to their lease, says the chief local forester Yevgeny Potapenko. Another time their snowmobiles broke down.

At the time of the notorious forest auctions in the state of "Jingye" there was only one person, the general director of Liu Weibo, therefore in the media it was sometimes called a "one-day" company. However, we found both an office and employees in one of the business centers in Tomsk. Officially, they declined to comment, but a company spokesman spoke to us on condition of anonymity.

Our interlocutor called the noise around Jinye "fried PR": the cost of the plots was not underestimated, but, on the contrary, overestimated, so Russian business did not take them. By the way, this is confirmed by the government website torgi. gov. ru (there is information about all the tenders). At least three of the five sites had previously been auctioned, but were canceled due to lack of applicants. And then "Jinye" came and took the taiga at the starting cost. “There is a lot of money, as they say. And, without understanding, they just bought these sites. To be honest, as a specialist, I don't need them. There is no logistics here,”our interlocutor gets excited.

Enemy from the East

Youtube is full of videos about how the Chinese cut down the Siberian taiga. Many contain the same footage - on a sunny winter day, the copter flies over a huge pile of logs, they are lying all the way to the horizon. Initially, this video appeared on Yuri Koval's Youtube channel, where it was uploaded in March 2017. Moreover, the author did not claim that the logs belong to the Chinese; this was speculated by numerous commentators.

This place is located near the Kuendat railway station of the Tomsk region. We visited there in February 2019. There are still a lot of logs. This place is the upper warehouse near the highway. Forest felled in different plots is brought here. According to Rosreestr, the site is leased by the Chulymles company, which is affiliated with the Tomlesdrev group, the largest timber company in the Tomsk region. It is controlled by the family of local United Russia deputy Anton Nachkebia. Moreover, judging by the information on the Tomlesdrev website, part of the timber is used for domestic production. That is, this picture is not about Chinese expansion at all.

Why did the Chinese become the main enemies of the taiga? “This is not a feature of Russia, all countries that border China are afraid of China,” says Irkutsk politician Sergei Bespalov. The Baikal region is one of the most problematic places. The taiga is teeming with black loggers, and the felled forest - both legal and “laundered” - goes to China. - The second reason, more offensive: Siberia has actually become a raw material appendage of China. And if we are accustomed to being a raw material appendage of the West, then being a raw material appendage of the East is somehow humiliating, people argue. This thought annoys them."

While talking with residents of the Irkutsk and Tomsk regions, Krasnoyarsk Territory, we often heard about a certain Chinese textbook, where the entire territory of Russia east of the Urals is attributed to the PRC. None of our interlocutors have seen this textbook, but the myth about it is surprisingly tenacious. Residents of small villages take the Chinese, even tourists, as potential invaders in all seriousness.

The Chinese threat is refuted by the economic model of China itself, argues the former coordinator of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific program at the Carnegie Moscow Center Vita Spivak. Economic activity is concentrated in the southern regions, closer to the sea, while the northern territories are less populated. “Of course, no one is going to physically move further north, to Russia. To buy resources - yes, but this is a common economic story,”says Spivak.

By opinion. expert, the Russian elite has a clear understanding that China is not an enemy or a threat to Russia. But this card can be played in front of the population from time to time. “The worst thing is that it’s easier and more convenient for our people to take out their anger at some strangers, supposedly invaders, than trying to control their own officials,” sums up Spivak.

Flame

In May 2017, Kansk, the capital of sawmills, was engulfed in a terrible fire. The fire broke out in the industrial area, but quickly spread to the residential sector. Three streets in the settlement of Stroiteley were completely burnt out; these are more than 60 private houses. Three people were killed. When the fire was extinguished, dirty, soot-covered people returned to the wasteland, where their houses had recently stood, recalls Anna Malinich. Her daughter died that day.

The fire started on the territory of the Va-bank sawmill, owned by the family of the local United Russia deputy Maxim Shkaruba. However, most of all fire victims criticize another sawmill, the Chinese "Xin-I". It was there that shavings, slabs and other wood waste were scattered in the open air.

When the fire broke out, Egor Schmitka was 20 years old. At "Xin-Y" something was constantly burning, especially at night, because the owners allegedly did not want to pay for the normal disposal of waste. “There were fires, firemen came, put out, left. We complained to the administration. "Xin-Y" seemed to be closed, but then they actually opened side by side, "Schmitke recalls.

“The Chinese are masters at giving bribes,” Sergei Bespalov grins.

“The Chinese are as bad guys as they are allowed in this or that country,” says Vita Spivak. “The Chinese are not the source of our troubles, but their amplifier. They use all our holes in the legislation, all the bad ones, to make a profit,”says Aleksey Yaroshenko from Greenpeace.

… Together with Yegor Schmitke, we walk along the concrete fence, behind which the "Sin-I" was once located. In one place - a hole in human growth. The hilly territory is visible, the cranes of the operating sawmills stick out in the distance. “These bumps are not landscape, they are sawdust under the snow,” says Schmitke. A few hundred meters away, a brick chimney is sticking out in a bare field. This is all that remains of his house.