A handful of Chinese workers and just one Russian, Sasha, are working hard to keep up a brisk pace in the sawing and processing of the wood, under the watchful eye of Natasha, who rules the company with an iron fist. The large trunks of Korean pine are being chopped up to separate the bark from the wood. They are then quickly transformed into lumber and piled up ready to be sold. The workshop conditions are basic; the equipment mostly consists of manual tools and old-fashioned machinery and the noise is deafening. Health and safety measures are kept to a minimum: there are no helmets, dust masks or barriers protecting the employees from the gigantic saw. A stumble, error or simple bad luck could easily lead a worker to find himself an arm down in a matter of seconds. The small wooden cabin with three rooms harbors a modest kitchen, a dining room with a table and benches and an office where Natasha carries out her administrative tasks: buying and selling wood, producing logistical diagrams and paying the weekly salaries. The employees sleep in another hut: six men live in just one room with enough space for four built-in beds and a television, while another room is home to three women. These are simple dwellings without any luxuries where the employees spend most of their free time either sleeping or watching the small television resting on a stool, especially during the savage winters which hit this part of the world.
Sasha, the young Russian, is of medium stature and is dressed in a military uniform. He is twenty-five years old with a blond crew-cut. We approach him in the middle of his lunch hour, when he is sitting at the only table along with his Chinese colleagues, but at a little distance apart. All the workers are eating Chinese food, but he is the only one using a fork. “They pay me 250 rubles [6 euros] for a day’s work. It’s a very small amount,” he tells us. Natasha admits that on average the Russian employees are paid 20 percent less than the Chinese. “This company would not be viable if it only had Russian employees. The Russians drink a lot and are very undisciplined. The Chinese are better workers and they don’t cause trouble,” she explains to justify this difference in salaries. “We don’t force anybody to stay here. If somebody isn’t happy, they can leave,” she continues, using a type of discriminatory language which we found ourselves hearing fairly often throughout the course of our journey through the “Chinese world.” For the Chinese, it is others who have to adapt to their standards—in terms of employment, salaries or the environment—and not the other way around.
This system allows Natasha to make an honest living in return for a long string of sacrifices: dealing with the inhuman winters, the absence of her loved ones and the hard life of an illegal migrant. However, all this will soon become even more difficult as a result of the shortage of raw materials. With her piercing gaze, Natasha does not try to hide her thoughts about the current state of the forests. “We used to work mostly with hardwoods, but production levels have fallen dramatically. There are no reserves left,” she admits, leading us to believe that the chainsaws have devastated the region’s oak forests. “Now we only work with softwoods.”
THE SIBERIAN TIGER BECOMES A CANNIBAL
Although the corrupt tendencies of the Russian bureaucrats cannot only be attributed to the Chinese buyers, the latter do play a key role in the looting of the Siberian forests. The Chinese arrive in Siberia with ready money, offering astronomical prices to families or businesses in exchange for the most valuable wood, without showing any interest whatsoever in its origin or legality. Furthermore, a network of hundreds of buyers spread across various strategic geographical points has allowed the new emperors to take control of every aspect of the buying and selling process.5 “Chinese demand is encouraging this situation. At least half the timber trade comes from illegal logging. This is doing irreparable harm to the forests,” Anatoly Lebedev tells us. “The problem is not just the illegal logging, but also the plundering of everything that comes out of the forest. The Chinese aren’t interested in where the forestry products come from; they don’t care about the origin of the wood. It’s available on the market and so they think it’s not their responsibility. They therefore feel very comfortable with the bribery system. Those are the rules of the game and they are more than happy to take part. They don’t have any problems with it whatsoever.” The only thing that matters to the new business leaders is the profit that can be made by operating at the ground in the sector: on Russian soil they pay $350 for a cubic meter of top-quality oak, while this price doubles to over $700 once they have crossed the border.6
Vladimir Bojarnichov, an environmental expert at the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok, distributes the blame in equal parts for what is happening in Siberia’s natural treasure-trove. “The Chinese and the Russians share responsibility on a fifty-fifty basis for what is happening in our forests. The Chinese government is supporting its local economy and giving people incentives to exploit the forest. It has said to its people: ‘Our neighbor is now poor. If you want to get rich, now is the time,’ ” he tells us at his lecture theater on the outskirts of Vladivostok. Most of all, Bojarnichov denounces the policies adopted by Beijing and China’s local provincial governments to create wood-processing industrial zones on the other side of the border to enable China to absorb all the added value from Russia’s raw materials.
Within this framework, the provincial banks have granted concessional loans and the authorities have improved the infrastructure networks close to the border, as well as developing land and lowering taxes. All this has been done in order to lay the foundations for industrial areas such as the one that has transformed Suifenhe into such an important and enterprising provincial hub.7 At the same time, Beijing has refused to approve laws which would impose a greater level of control on the wood’s origin. The result is a city like Suifenhe, which barely three decades ago had a population of just 10,000 impoverished inhabitants and now boasts 30,000 residents, some of them as rich as Jiou Peng, who—as we saw in Chapter 1—picked us up at the station in his shiny new Porsche Cayenne. On top of this, the city has a floating population of up to 100,000 people who have been attracted by the job opportunities which Suifenhe offers as one of the timber capitals of China.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the buyers of the wood in this border town with its shiny new buildings and shopping centers welcome the merchandise like manna from heaven. The Siberian trees have become a source of employment and exceptional wealth: over 300 businesses are currently operating in the four wood-processing zones set up by the authorities. It is estimated that a minimum of 12,000 jobs have been generated in the area thanks to the resources obtained from the heart of Russia’s forests. In the rest of the country, over 200,000 workers8 are making a living in the timber industry based on importing untreated Russian timber.9
With such strong economic ties, nobody is surprised that the authorities reject any initiative aimed at controlling and tracking the origin of the wood, as is required by law in the United States and the European Union.10 It would not be a complicated process in the case of Russian wood, as a mere sixty or so companies based in northern China monopolize around 80 percent of trade in Russian timber.11 It would not take much to throw down the gauntlet and demand that these companies should take responsibility for their actions. However, millions of jobs and enormous profits in markets across the world—including those of the Swedish giant IKEA—are at stake, which explains China’s complete lack of interest in making such a move.12 “China is not going to stop illegal wood entering the country, because that would have a serious effect on its economy. It’s not feasible to expect China to do anything that would put the brakes on its economy,” said Xiangjun Yang of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an NGO aimed at ensuring the legal origin of wood, when we met her in Beijing. For the Chinese, economic development is the end that justifies the means.
The effect of these developments is being keenly felt in the Russian Far East, and not only in terms of the decline in the area’s tree reserves. Deforestation has severely disrupted an ecosystem which is
struggling to adapt and survive in the face of so much destruction. The most obvious example is the case of the emblematic Siberian tiger, Vladimir Bojarnichov explains. The indiscriminate logging has swept away key forest species such as the oak, and this has violently shaken the base of the sustainability pyramid, irreversibly affecting the food chain of the native fauna. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we went to visit Nikolai Salyuk, a geologist at the Moscow Institute and an activist in Primorsky’s forests since 1975. This experienced hunter and nature lover could tell us why the Siberian tiger, the king of the region’s native fauna, has found itself pushed to the edge of extinction. “The acorn, a key food source for the wild boars, is disappearing as a result of the logging process. As the oak population decreases, the quantity of acorns also decreases and the wild boars emigrate in search of a more suitable habitat for their survival. The tiger, which feeds on wild pigs and other prey, also leaves its traditional environment and therefore its feeding habits have changed.”
The explanation is simple: the indiscriminate logging has left the forest in a highly fragmented state, destroying its biodiversity. “In twenty-five years I have seen many changes in the tiger’s behavior. The tiger is an animal which naturally hunts alone, but sometimes it now hunts in groups. It has also started approaching human settlements, where it attacks dogs at sunrise because they’re an easy prey,” Salyuk points out, as he plays with a puppy at his home on the edge of the forest. “They’re so hungry that sometimes they even eat each other. I’ve witnessed instances of cannibalism,” he assures us. With his unrivaled knowledge of the local environment, he has no doubts about who is responsible. “The timber industry has endangered the tiger’s survival. It is the timber industry which has forced the animal into this extreme situation.”
Three months and tens of thousands of kilometers later, we were able to confirm that this was far from an isolated case. Instead, what is happening in Siberia—one of the largest ecological reserves on the planet—is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of China’s looting of rare hardwoods on a worldwide scale. Africa was the next stop on our journey.
MOZAMBIQUE: OTHER SPECIES, THE SAME CHINESE PATTERN
Completely oblivious to the danger that he is causing to our health and his four-wheel drive, our driver Li roars with laughter each time the Mitsubishi plunges at 100 kilometers per hour into one of the potholes plaguing the EN-1 highway between Maputo and the port of Beira. On the stretches of road where the asphalt—which has been partly repaired by Chinese companies, whose workers toil under a burning sun—offers a welcome respite from the otherwise torturous journey, we find ourselves mesmerized by the stunning landscape around us. During the day the magnificent blue of the sky eclipses the green and brown tones of the tropical land. The turquoise sea makes sporadic appearances along the route. When night falls, the thick darkness does not quite manage to swallow everything around us. From the heights of the Tropic of Capricorn, the stars emit a stunning halo of light.
After passing Vilankulos, the midpoint in the 1,000-kilometer journey between Maputo and Mozambique’s second city, two unconnected yet parallel phenomena perfectly sum up the situation here. The first appears suddenly, in the middle of the road, after we have just reached the brow of a hill: a group of policemen pounce on us, “armed” with somewhat dubious old-fashioned handheld speed cameras in the shape of hairdryers. The “fine” ($20 or $30 for the brancos) must be paid immediately although we never see the bill, demonstrating that corruption is the typical modus operandi used by the people who should theoretically be upholding the law. The next phenomenon is less abrupt but equally worrying: columns of smoke are rising up on either side of the road, filling the air with the smell of burning vegetation. These are fires started by the local people, who destroy hectares of forests in order to win territory so that they can practice itinerant agriculture. The ashes of tanga tanga and ebony are used as a sad fertilizer for the crops sown by the region’s tribes and minority groups, demonstrating that the forest here is under constant threat.
However, the precious species which fill the forests and national parks of central and northern Mozambique, near the fertile banks of the Zambezi River, often do manage to avoid going up in flames. This is not because they are resistant to fire—like the fireproof chacate, for example—but because they are simply no longer there: before the flames can reach their gigantic trunks (some of them 30 meters high) they have already set sail in a cargo ship to China. Just before we arrive in Inchope, a town approximately 50 kilometers away from Beira, we run into a group of illicit local woodcutters. There are six of them, none of them older than twenty-five, resting on a pile of logs. They examine us defiantly, grasping their axes for the first few minutes of the conversation. After the obligatory small talk about football and women, they gradually begin to relax. One of them, João, speaks for the whole group.
“We work for ten hours a day. We come into the forest and we cut wood which people later buy from us. Sometimes the Chinese come directly to buy from us. We work in a group because the trees are very big. They give us ten dollars each to take them what we’ve felled.” In China, the price of a cubic meter of rare hardwoods (mahogany, ironwood, ebony, rosewood and wenge, the most expensive of all) range between 600 and 1,700 euros. João is unable to say exactly how much they fell each day: “Sometimes five, sometime ten trunks.” Without a chainsaw this is backbreaking work. Some of them are barefoot, while the more fortunate among them get by with flip-flops and woolen gloves. They all wear caps or hats to hold the cloths which hang down the back of their necks as far as their shoulders. “That’s to protect us from the cobras and other poisonous snakes. They often fall out of trees while we’re working and land on our backs,” João explains.
Ana Alonso is no stranger to these forest raids. This Spanish businesswoman owns a concession (Euromoz) of some 60,000 hectares—the equivalent of the metropolitan area of Madrid—made up of undergrowth, savanna and grassland. We meet her in Beira, the timber capital of the country and the departure point for many of the ships that transport the raw material which will end up as luxury parquet flooring or the type of sturdy wooden tables that decorate China’s most exclusive urban offices and homes. She is fifty-seven years old and dresses in khaki camouflage clothing. She drives an old Toyota jeep and we can recognize her from a distance because of her long hair. After seventeen years spent living in the country, she does not mince her words. She gets straight to the point: “The sector here is dirty and corrupt. Chinese corruption has filled the pockets of Mozambique’s middle- and lower-level officials. The provincial forestry services have got rich very quickly.”
Alonso’s outspoken attitude means that she has to be accompanied at all times by a bodyguard armed with a rifle: corrupt officials, businessmen, mafia agents and even government ministers have threatened to have her killed because of her campaigning work against deforestation and illegal logging practices. “When I receive a death threat from someone important in the country I publish a full-page advert in all of Mozambique’s major newspapers, reporting who is trying to intimidate me and why. Publicly exposing the threat is a way of protecting myself,” she explains bravely as she shows us a few examples at her home. As we begin to learn more about the inner workings of Mozambique’s timber industry, the similarities with what we have seen in Russia become more and more evident.
In fact, the pattern would be exactly the same if it wasn’t for the fact that the participation of Chinese state-owned companies in Mozambique is far greater than in Russia:13 while Chinese companies do not dirty their hands by participating in the actual logging process, they do lend money to Mozambicans to get them to act as “straw men” by giving the companies access to concessions that are technically only open to Mozambican nationals. By granting loans to Mozambicans so that they can buy the necessary materials (chainsaws, lorries, etc.) and pay the cash deposits required by the authorities to exploit the concessions, the Chinese companies pile the locals w
ith debt, forcing them to sell the resources gained from the forest to the Chinese under highly favorable conditions.14 As it is illegal to export unprocessed first- and second-quality wood species, bribes are used to ensure that the wood nonetheless leaves the country. “The whole system is completely corrupt because this helps to increase profit margins. If the companies exploit the concessions legally and follow the laws and rules governing exports, they can make a maximum 10 percent profit. However, if they bribe the officials so that they can export unprocessed wood, avoid paying taxes and fail to commit to reforestation plans, the profit margin will exceed 50 percent,” Alonso assures us in reference to the Chinese middlemen. The Chinese apparently take to this chaotic system like ducks to water. “Other foreign companies are also corrupt in some ways, but the Chinese have a whole system of corruption in place so that the industry will work for them. If there are different levels of illegality, the Chinese are the most illegal,” she argues.
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