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Final Report: Conclusions and Recommendations

Conclusions and Recommendations The activities of the partners in the project over the last two years have been to concentrate on community monitoring of logging activities and to assess the various manifestations of illegal logging. As a result of numerous meetings and talks with ordinary residents of forest villages, the illegal loggers and official lessees, and also as a result of analysing trends in the implementation of legislative and administrative reform in Russia's forestry sector, the following basic conclusions and recommendations have been made by the Russian partners.

1. The illegal forestry business, orientated increasingly towards the growing Chinese market, is a complicated mix of social, legal, economic and cultural factors, and is generally a result of the poor, corrupt management of the country, territories and forests and from incomplete legislation. First and foremost, therefore, it is vital that the system that allows bribery and corruption to flourish must be dismantled.

2. Unauthorized loggers, whose activities the government and large businesses have created a powerful system of monitoring and suppression to put an end to, in fact fall into two basically different social groups or two different models of behaviour. The first group comprises medium and large commercial logging companies, who profit from the illegal components of their companies and are helping to reinforce the system of illegal corrupt links in the territory. The second group comprises small and medium-sized taiga businesses, which are trying to encourage the economic development of their districts and villages, but refuse to pay taxes as this money is almost never reinvested in the district or village. They prefer to distribute part of their income through informal channels in the form of bribes, cash-in-hand payments and investments.

3. The solution to the problem of illegal logging, therefore, does not lie in tightening up the taxation system, which would produce a mindless 'witch-hunt' and only lead to the development of an increasingly complex system of bribes. It lies in the state allowing the second group of unauthorized loggers to become fully legal by redistributing forestry zones in their favour, lowering the obligatory start-up taxes for the businesses and, for example, by creating special district funds for distributing part of the profits made by these small businesses locally.

4. Society's efforts in working with this group of unauthorized entrepreneurs must be concentrated on furthering their environmental awareness and encouraging the protection of water conservation zones, valuable forests and protected species of trees and the need to develop an integrated system of forest management to decrease the volume of wood harvested. Therefore, society must do everything possible to provide legal aid, information, publicity and administrative support for small businesses that are in the process of legalizing their activities.

5. As outlined in the draft Forestry Code, the necessary powers should be given to the larger lessees of the forest and also to community organizations working in conjunction with the police to fight against dangerous illegal loggers who destroy the taiga, a group which often includes logging companies from other districts and regions.

6. The government agencies of the executive and legislative authorities of the federation and the regions must pay particularly detailed attention to developing measures that favour the local wholesale industry and local processors and exporters and to support them in exporting directly to the Chinese market and consequently boosting their profit margins, rather than continuing to allow the often illegal exploitation of forests by foreign nationals who often enter the country as illegal immigrants.

7. Civil society groups should be supported by governments at all levels, from the local to the international, to play an active role in forest policy development and implementation, in order to achieve forest policies that protect the environmental goods and services provided by forests whilst also developing environmentally and socially sustainable forest enterprises.