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Abolishing of the Russian Federal Forest Service

The Russian Federal Forest Service (Rosleskhoz) has been also abolished by the same President's Decree as the Environmental Protection Committee has.

The Russian environmental NGOs' approach to joining of the Federal Forest Service with the Natural Resources Ministry is a bit different than to the Environmental Protection Committee case. The issue is not about the independent control on forestry since the Russian Federal Forest Service had even before combined functions of both forests control and exploitation. (And this is one of the main sources of problems with forest usage and forest protection in Russia, in our extend.) However, we should anyway state that including the Forest Service into the Natural Resources Ministry is the step from bad to worse.

While meeting with the Federal Forest Service stuff the Natural Resources Minister Mr.Yatskevich showed complete lack of understanding the difference between mineral and forest resources. in the beginning he stressed a big weakness of the Russian Forest Service that there is no one new tree species has been grown while over 200 years of the Service's history. Further on, the minister stated that reforestation and suppressing forest fires are not needed at all - only logging, logging and logging should be the goal of the new Forest Service.

According the information we have there are plans inside the Natural Resources Ministry to reduce sufficiently the control functions of leskhozes (local Forest Service's offices), as far as decrease a number of leskhozes or even eliminate them. This step will kill may be the only structures in the Federal Forest Service, which do at least some control over the forest industries operating in the forests. We should also take into account that the main share of the more or less progressive foresters works on the leskhozes level.

This weakening of the state control over forests will be probably "compensate" by introducing private property on the forests in Russia. As You may know, there is still no private forests in Russia. The federal Forest Code directly states the federal state property on all or nearly all forests in Russia. The legal situation with the private property on land in general is also still unclear in Russia. The new Land Code is now under preparation in the lower house of the Russian parliament (State Duma). According to the information we have now, at least one bill includes the possibility for private property on the industrial forests.

However, this is rather clear that private property on forest with even more weak control than now will hardly lead to more environmental friendly forestry. The experiences of some former soviet republics, which introduced private property on forests (like Estonia, for example), only proof this sentence.

Based on all these issues Russian environmental NGOs demand to preserve the Russian Federal Forest as an independent agency or, at least, to keep it as a separate structure inside the Natural Resources Ministry. Also all environmental control functions of the Service should be kept out of the Natural Resources Ministry, which is interested in the development of resources.

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