Seeing the wood, not the forest

Environmentalists in the Czech Republic are fighting a battle with the Ministry of Agriculture and the country’s largest forestry company, Lesy CR, over the long term management of the country’s 1.3 million hectares of forest.

The Ministry wants to hand over the full management of the county’s forests – which cover an area larger than the island of Corsica – to Lesy CR but environmentalists say that this means it will be virtually impossible to control the company’s activities, especially because the contract would run for 10 years, a long time in the forestry business. “Basically, one company will be responsible for all the logging, tree planting, timber removal and timber trade over a huge area and for a long time,” said the Czech branch of Friends of the Earth’s (Hnutí Duha) head campaigner Vojtech Kotecký.

Environmentalists cite a report from the state auditing authority which shows that big forestry companies harvested around 40 percent more timber than they should have when they were given this sort of leeway in the past. And they say the model for managing forests is virtually unprecedented in the Czech Republic and outside with smaller, shorter and limited contracts preferred because they give more scope for the timber firms to be supervised.

“Every single private forestry company in the Czech Republic and every state in neighbouring countries do it this way with smaller contracts and they sell the timber themselves instead of letting the company which logs the trees sell them,” said Kotecký.

The environmental group also argues that some major timber companies have themselves come out against the ministry proposal saying it would amount to the destruction of state forests. It also claims that there was more than a hint that the mega timber contracts have been tailor made for companies with close links to the biggest party in the coalition government, the Civic Democrats. The Ministry of Agriculture, on the other hand, argues that big contracts bring in more money and are better suited to the state forestry companies’ limited resources.

Find out more: www.hnutiduha.cz