Erstellt am: 31. 10. 2015 - 16:21 Uhr

Forest Theft - The Destruction of A Natural Treasure

How Europe's last great virgin forest in Romania is being destroyed and an Austrian company is accused of complicity.

The US-based Environmental Investigation Agency - the EIA - has accused an Austrian owned timber processing company called Schweighofer of "stealing" Europe’s last virgin forest.

The EIA’s executive director Alexander von Bismarck says he can back up these allegations with the fruits of a two-year investigation, during which, he claims, he caught the company red-handed. Acting as an undercover investigator, von Bismarck says he caught top Schweighofer officials on video promising to buy unsourced wood.

"Romania’s virgin forest is being cut down at a frightening rate illegally," von Bismarck told me, "and it is being willingly bought - knowingly bought - by the largest Austrian timber company and sold to all of us."

It’s a claim that Schweighofer rigorously denies; saying that it is in the company’s own interest to encourage sustainable forestry in order to guarantee its future supply of wood.

Matthias Schickhofer

A Biodiversity Haven

Romania’s forests matter to all of us because they are a biodiversity haven unparalleled in Europe. According to WWF estimates, Romania hosts two-thirds of the continent’s virgin forest - i.e. woodland that has been left virtually untouched by human development.

"When we talk about virgin forest, people think about Borneo or the Amazon, or Congo or Indonesia", says Magor Csibi, the director of WWF Romania, "but few people realise what we have right here in Europe in Romania. We have forest that is untouched. It looks like it did two thousand years ago."

It is also a haven for the large carnivores that have disappeared across most of the rest of Europe, says Csibi; those rare but iconic animals whose habitat is now threatened by the illegal loggers: "When you see bears, wolves and lynx and when you see the whole ecosystem, encompassing 13,000 species, existing together, it makes you realise that this is a value we can’t afford to lose."

Agent Green

And yet we are losing it. Satellite analysis suggests the country has lost 280,000 hectares of forest during the last decade: much of it to illegal logging. Von Bismarck says his team went to Romania because for years it has been known to be a "hotspot" for illegal logging in Europe:
"We went into the forest to find the illegalities and they weren’t hard to find. We then followed the wood and again and again we ended up at the gates of the saw mill for this company called Schweighofer".

Schweighofer: "We have nothing to do with this illegal wood"

Georg Erlacher is a spokesperson from Schweighofer’s management team. He categorically denies his company has been involved in any wrong doing. "In all our systems we work in the proper and correct fashion. We can prove that the wood that turns up at Schweighofer comes from legal sources. We check it with all the mechanisms available to us and we are therefore sure we have nothing to do with this illegal wood."

But von Bismarck says a video that the EIA has posted on the sharing platform YouTube proves this is not the case. He and his team pretended to be foreign investors who would be willing to cut down more trees than a permit allows - a form of illegal logging called overcutting. "We went in offering illegal wood. I told them I only had permission to cut this much but I wanted to cut twice as much. In two separate meetings the top managers of that company said they would take it and even offered us bonuses for it."

Schweighofer says the video clip in which this conversation takes place has been taken out of context to make legitimate business dealings sound dubious and Georg Erlacher demands that the EIA publish the entirety of the raw footage to clear up what he sees as a misunderstanding. Von Bismarck’s response is scathing: "I’m still confused about what is meant to be out of context. It’s a very simple video. I offer illegal wood and they say yes. I’m confused as to why they are confused."

Agent Green

Whoever is culpable, what is beyond any doubt is that the forests are being decimated at what von Bismarck describes as a "frightening rate". And someone is buying that wood. Gabriel Paun, the head of a Romanian environmental NGO called Agent Green, cites the government’s own statistics showing that 165,000 cubic metres of illegal wood have entered mills in Sebes, a Transylvanian town that hosts 27 timber processing companies including Schweighofer.

In total, Agent Green reports that 366,000 hectares of Romanian forest was illegally chopped down between 1990 and 2011.

Paun says that it is too easy for illegal loggers to forge or fabricate the documents and that processing companies are not carrying out the proper checks: "I think Schweighofer is trying to say that they are not liable for illegal wood because they are not logging it themselves. They think if the wood is at their gate with papers then they are not liable for that. But that is not the way a responsible company should act."

Wood-Watch

The problem of illegal deforestation has become so widespread in Romania that there is an emergency number to track the legality of wood - as well as the police, fire-brigade, ambulance and mountain-rescue, you get through to the wood watch.

Agent Green

Paun says that Schweighofer’s management had promised they didn’t take any wood from national parks. Yet through desktop and field research he says that, between February and November 2014, he and his team traced 10,000 cubic metres of wood from the core protected zone of the Retezat national park in the central part of western Romania right to the gates of the Schweighofer mills. "They lied to my face and they broke their commitment systematically."

Pepper-Sprayed At The Gates

The environmentalist backs up this serious allegation with evidence he says is water tight. He and his team filmed the trucks and tracked their position using GPS positioning equipment. They documented what he described as the exact same logs of "healthy spruce wood" leaving the protected national park and entering through the company’s gates.

Matthias Schickhofer

"We took photos of the daily paper to prove that the footage was not out of date. It was like something out of the investigators’ handbook." Paun says he tried to go to the processing site to confront the Schweighofer management with his evidence but claims he was pushed to the floor by guards and pepper-sprayed.

Schweighofer’s Georg Erlacher says his company has a "weiße Weste" or a clean record.

There is hope in the fight against deforestation in Romania, insists the EIA’s Alexander von Bismarck. Rules are being tightened and the impetus has come from civil society. After thousands of Romanians took to the streets to demand action in May this year the government signed a new forestry code aimed at cracking down on illegal logging and protecting wildlife habitat. Schweighofer objected to a clause in the new forestry code which sets a 30% maximum market share per tree species for any one timber firm. The Austrian company argued it violated competition laws. But the law was passed.

Matthias Schickhofer

There are new standards popping up all around the world that stipulate that trade in illegal wood must stop, says Alexander von Bismarck of the EIA. It is becoming increasingly hard for the buyers to knowingly say yes to illegal wood. There’s a new timber law in Europe, although environmentalists say it remains to be seen if it has teeth, there’s a new law in the US. There’s also new law in Australia and Japan is mulling a similar move. The EIA thinks things are moving in the right direction:

"If companies and consumers take action," says von Bismarck, "the heroes in Romania fighting to save their forest really do have a chance."