British demand for wood products is destroying rare animals' Baltic sanctuary
By Charles Clover Environment Editor
ANCIENT European forests, unique as the home of the wolf, lynx, beaver and black stork, are being destroyed for use in Britain's paper and building materials.
Conservationists and retailers, such as the Do-It-All chain, have expressed anxiety at the 700 per cent rise in logging in one year in Latvia and the lack of safeguards to prevent the best areas being destroyed.
Woodland - mostly Scots pine, Norway spruce and birch - covers nearly half of the once-rich Baltic state, which won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Until now in Latvia, late industrialisation and low logging pressure has preserved a richness of wildlife lost in Britain during the Middle Ages.
Most remarkable are Latvia's mosquito-infested swamp forests - ancient woodlands growing ash, maple and other broadleaves. Flood plain forests, which make up a quarter of Latvia's forest area, have mostly been eradicated by drainage in western Europe.
Beaver dams and lodges are a frequent sight in Latvia's streams and lakes. Returns show that 1,117 beavers were shot last year out of a population of more than 26,000. Hunters killed more than 9,000 wild boar.
Latvia's forests hold 1,000 pairs of black storks, now reduced to one breeding pair in western Europe, together with short-toed eagles, white storks and many species of woodpecker. Around 200 wolves are shot each year.
This profusion of wildlife is threatened by logging. Britain is the largest importer of Latvian timber, taking half a million cubic metres of sawn timber a year through Dundee, Grangemouth, Scunthorpe, Ipswich and Liverpool, together with even larger volumes of pulp.
The increased logging follows privatisation of the state forestry enterprises and the return of 120,000 plots of forest land to families who owned them when Stalin invaded the Baltic republics in 1940.
Most of the impoverished new owners have no experience of forest management and regard timber as the means to buying a car.
Ugis Rotbergs, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Latvia, says the clear-felling required by state regulations is leading to an erosion of wildlife.
"The state forest service has no inventory of biologically important areas. Eagles need tall trees to nest in, woodpeckers need dead trees and rare insects need fallen wood to be left to rot."
The WWFN surveyed 20 of the most important ancient forests, a tiny fraction of the forest area, and found that one had already been partly destroyed by clear-felling.
Presently, protection applies only to forests planted along roads by the Germans and the Soviets for military use.
Latvia has, however, collaborated with the fund in setting up a 35,000-acre pilot project in the Smiltenes area where state regulations are waived, mature trees are left to provide seed and debris is left to fertilise regeneration.
The project has the backing of Silva, Latvia's largest private timber company.
Gerard Magill, of Do-It-All, one of several British retailers committed to taking timber only from sustainably-managed forests, said he would be asking his suppliers not to use Latvian timber unless its forests were certified as properly managed.
However, trade sources in Latvia say there is such great demand for timber that a boycott by a few Western companies will mean timber simply goes to other, less discriminating markets.
