WWF: Russia’s Primorye Runs Out of Commercial Forest

The innocent act of buying furniture in America may make you an unwitting accomplice to Russia’s logging mafia, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said on Monday. Illegal logging became an industry with an annual turnover of at least $450 million – possibly far more – in Russia’s Far East, after the Primorye Region ran out of commercial forests, the head of WWF Russia Igor Chestin said at a press conference in Moscow. An estimated 450,000 cubic meters of timber were harvested illegally in the region in 2011, most of it going to the United States, Japan and the EU by way of Chinese furniture factories, Chestin said. Loggers are able to encroach on protected forests thanks to flawed legislation and nonexistent law enforcement, though the government is working with the WWF to change the situation, he said. “We want to cut this Gordian knot, though we’re met with stiff resistance,” Chestin said.

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130225/179679901/Russias-Primorye-Runs-Out-of-Commercial-Forest--WWF.html