In un reportage pubblicato su The New Republic, Alexander Sammon racconta il mercato – legale e illegale – del legname proveniente dalle foreste rumene e destinato per la maggior parte alla multinazionale svedese Ikea, indagando al contempo le pratiche intimidatrici e spesso violente ai danni di attivisti e guardie forestali esercitate da chi vi è direttamente coinvolto.
L’articolo inizia descrivendo l’avventura di due documentaristi, che stavano seguendo un ambientalista locale per documentare il taglio illegale di alberi in una delle zone a più intenso sfruttamento forestale.
The filmmakers—Mihai Dragolea, a director, and Radu Mocanu, a cameraman—were shadowing a local environmentalist, Tiberiu Bosutar. A former wood chipper turned activist, Bosutar was no stranger to illegal timber. Over the course of five years, he had built a reputation as something of a forest vigilante, accosting loggers engaged in questionable activity or following trucks stuffed with wood contraband, then streaming the encounters on Facebook Live. Just a few weeks before, he’d gone viral broadcasting an attempt to detain a truck carrying illegal logs; when his white SUV ran out of gas, he flagged down an ambulance and kept up the chase. […]
It didn’t take long before they saw what they came for: stumps. “The forest was fucked up to the bone,” Dragolea told me. “It was really damaged.” No surprise, really, and on any other day, Bosutar might have taken to Facebook. Instead, he chose to call the forest ranger’s office. It was an ideal opportunity, he thought, to showcase the potential for communication between activists, law enforcement, and loggers, and fulfill a New Year’s resolution to try a less combative approach. “It was a good moment to show that we are open to dialogue.” […]
Not long after, they heard the whinge of engines; soon, two SUVs arrived. Out jumped not local police, but a horde: 15 men armed with bats and axes. The documentary crew broke for Bosutar’s car but couldn’t get the locks in time. The attackers pried the doors open, snapped the key, slashed the tires, and smashed the camera equipment. They beat Mocanu, trapped between the car and the mountainside, unconscious. They clubbed Dragolea in the face. The director dove down the nearby ravine, where he hid under the roots of a fallen tree and called the police, begging them to come with their sirens on.
La Romania ospita una delle più estese foreste vergini del mondo, e la più estesa in Europa al di fuori dalla Scandinavia: a partire dalla caduta del comunismo, il settore è stato interessato da intensa privatizzazione, e con esso è aumentata la corruzione: l’ingresso del Paese nell’Unione Europea, nel 2007, ha garantito l’accesso ad un enorme mercato di legname, guidato dalla crescita del settore dell’arredamento.
There’s one obvious, notable beneficiary of this situation: Ikea. The company is now the largest individual consumer of wood in the world, its appetite growing by two million trees a year. According to some estimates, it sources up to 10 percent of its wood from the relatively small country of Romania, and has long enjoyed relationships with mills and manufacturers in the region. In 2015, it began buying up forestland in bulk; within months it became, and remains, Romania’s largest private landowner.
The global market’s edacity for timber, perhaps predictably, has gone far beyond the legal limits set up by an already permissive state. According to a 2018 report, initially suppressed by the Romanian government and leaked later that year, the country saw 38.6 million cubic meters of wood exit its forests annually during the preceding four-year period; the government had licensed just 18.5 million cubic meters. In other words, without even accounting for possible violations based on method of extraction, more than half of the country’s timber is illegally harvested. Even legal logging, which on private and public land alike must be preceded by a forest management plan that is approved by the government, can be rife with corruption and abuse. Since roughly the date of Romania’s accession to the EU, between half and two-thirds of the country’s virgin forest has been lost.
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