Forest Club model projects and sites

Issue 16, Dec. 2000

On the 17th of March, 2000, President Putin dismissed the State Committee for Environment Protection and the Federal Forest Service. The Ministry of Natural Resources became the successor of these institutions. But even now, more than a year later, aims of this reorganization remain unclear. The question: "What are the changes?" still has no answer. In on recent press-conference the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Alexey Poryadin said that this reorganization will result in the strenghtening of the environmental control, because... now the Minister cannot say that official watchdogs do their work in an inappropriate way and the whole responsibility lays on him. But such a dubious explanation is hard to accept.

It had seemed that the Ministry of Natural Resources simply didn't know what to do with the "swallowed" institutions, before we managed to find a very interesting document published in the Internet (http://www.economy.gov.ru/program/soderzanie.html). This official document called "The Main Orientations of the Russian Federation Government Socio-Economical Policy in the Long-Term Perspective" says that the government has a cultural policy, a public health policy, a northern territories policy, a sports, tourism and resorts development policy, but an environmental policy is not even mentioned! So in this sphere we another one time face the formula repeated by different governmental officials: "Economy is the first, environment is the second".

To present the authors of the document haven't learned the word combination "sustainable development". The only sustainable thing they know is sustainable economic growth that is considered a silver bullet to fight all the social and economic problems. That's why the document declares a government's wish to simplify a system of formal requirements to the market players. In this context the fact that the forest sector is mentioned among the most competitive branches of Russian industry become the frightening one, because the government's line aimed to release the bureaucratic pressure in practice will result in elimination of all the environmental barriers on the way to the desired economic growth. It means that the Russian forest market will be overflown with the firms which even haven't heard about the forest sertification, the illegal logging in the Russian Far East will be legal etc. In addition, the government want to deny access to an official statistic data declaring it a commercial secret, that will make any independent control from civil society impossible, and minimize the budget expences for forest protection, reforestation, pest and insect control. The document calls it minimalization of the state participation. The budget money might have been spent for the special committee (also mentioned in the document) that will regulate... the market deregulation.

But a lack of the policy is the policy too. The new concept of "double approach" to privatization that also exists in the document shows that the state simply want to escape from its environmental protection duties for not to disturb those who will privatize and then embezzle the last part of the national wealth. This concept has two key points: the first is the punishment without terms of limitation for the economic crimes related to the privatization process, and the second is the absolute immunity for the privatized posession even if the law was broken. Unfortunately it's too easy to predict that this concept being realized will lead not to the economic, but to the corruption index growth.

It seems that the sence of President Putin's decision to dismiss the institutions mentioned in the beginning of this article is to assassin the unwanted ones. And how the Russian environment will look like after the deregulation - is to anyone's guess.