How to reform government-run forestry?

Forestry professionals have been heatedly debating about reforms of late. Nobody doubts their necessity, only what model should be used: Russian, German, Latvian or Polish? How to combat illegal logging? Who are the main crooks? These are complicated issues, and experts are racking their minds trying to find answers.

Perhaps an answer is to be found in the boondocks, by polling the populace?

The ENPI FLEG Program (“Improving Forest Law Enforcement and Governance in the European Neighborhood Policy East Countries and Russia”) has taken an interest in this issue, considering that Ukraine is one of the seven participating countries. As stated on its official website, this program is aimed at supporting the “governments, civil society, and the private sector in participating countries in the development of sound and sustainable forest management practices, including reducing the incidence of illegal forestry activities.” In view of the EU’s rigid control over illicit timber supplies, to be implemented shortly, it has provided Ukraine with six million dollars to finance this three-year program, entrusting such internationally acclaimed organizations as the World Bank, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the World Wildlife Fund with helping and supervising its implementation.

The ENPI FLEG uses polls to assess the state of forestry in Ukraine. Recently such polls were carried out by SOCIS in three raions — Skole (Lviv oblast), Tiachiv (Zakarpattia), and Bohorodchany (Ivano-Frankivsk oblast) — each involving 400 respondents, based on an analysis of every administrative district (raion), using customs authorities’ databases and local forest rangers’ expert views. Respondents were of both sexes and reflecting the age structure of the local rural populace.

The result was a generally negative local attitude to the rural forestry management; more than one-third of the respondents pointed to a number of serious shortcomings that had to be eliminated forthwith; about the same number said the existing system was misperforming and that serious changes were in order.

The populace knows that there are people stealing trees; every fifth respondent admitted that he or she had heard about such illicit timber procurement transactions, with 56 percent saying they knew of a local go-between firm that would purchase timber from forest rangers and deliver it to the customer; 41 percent believed that there were separate cases of unlawful logging, serving as a front for a great many others kept away from the official eye.

It is also true that quite a few local residents chop down trees, acting against the law. Why? Among the reasons, 70 percent of the respondents mentioned the lack of money to buy timber/firewood and low living standards; corruption (30 percent); absence of official forestry control (25 percent); lack of penalization (22 percent); availability of timber due to forest’s proximity (21 percent), and unwillingness to endure the red tape (10 percent).

The sociologists asked who was to blame and also what had to be done to upgrade Ukraine’s forestry. Sixty percent of respondents stated the need to toughen the legal punishment for the illicit chopping down of trees, with a mere five percent agreeing that privatizing the forests would serve as a cure-all solution to the problem. Therefore, the majority is for government control over Ukrainian forests and harsher measures against the malefactors.

These findings will be used when working out a FLEG program for Ukraine, and when working on Ukraine’s forestry policy, specifically when developing a national plan to combat forestry corruption. Such plans exist in a number of countries. The trouble with Ukraine is that it doesn’t have a clear-cut tactic or strategy to combat the corruption in the forests that cover one-sixth of its territory.