ENVIRONMENT: Court Ruling Targets Foreign Log imports

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 25 1997 (IPS) - Plans to import raw logs from Chile, Russia, and New Zealand into the United States have suffered a setback, with a recent court ruling in favour of environmentalists.

Three environmental groups had taken the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to court over the agency’s regulations for the importation of untreated timber. They argued that lax rules were allowing destructive pests and fungi to slip into the country with the raw logs and threaten entire eco-systems.

The two sides have until later this month to suggest possible remedies to the judge.

The problem began when Louisiana Pacific, a major U.S. timber company, brought two test shiploads of raw logs from Russia to the port of Eureka in northern California in 1990. The wood was immediately quarantined by APHIS but was eventually released for processing. Then, In 1995, APHIS issued regulations, allowing regular imports of untreated logs to be stored at mill sites for up to two months before receiving treatment to kill pests.

The Oregon Natural Resources Council, the Northcoast Environmental Centre, and the Pacific Environment and Resources Centre took the agency to court in San Francisco, calling the ruling environmentally dangerous and arguing that the nation’s forests were being exposed to destructive, imported pests.

APHIS was clearly “more interested in international commerce than protection of forests”, the three groups said in a statement at the time.

Late last month, the court ruled that the environmentalists were correct in saying that the agency had not done proper environmental impact studies of the regulations or assessments of the possible alternatives.

Exotic pests have always constituted a major threat to native ecosystems. U.S. government data shows that some 100 million trees in the United States were killed by Dutch elm disease following a shipment of European logs into New York City in the 1920s. Chestnut trees, which had filled up to 25 percent of the United States’ eastern forests at the turn of the century, were virtually wiped out by 1950. The problem was a fungus traced to a source in Japan.

Many of the exotic insects and fungi, with names like the Asian gypsy moth, the pine bark beetle, and the Mexican pitch canker, are brought in on logs by companies that have been searching out wood supplies in the heart of the world’s few remaining primal forests.

Industry says that the importation of raw logs is a new trend that is driven by the fact that logging on federally owned lands was banned in 1990. Several pulp and woodchip mills in the United States have been looking for new sources of wood to supplement the timber cut on private lands.

David Gordon, director of the Pacific Environment and Resources Centre, says that the three environmental groups will ask the court to ban imports of raw logs altogether.

In the meantime, APHIS officials are scratching their heads.

“The judge has identified deficiencies in the permit, but we don’t yet know what we are supposed to do to correct them,” Nolan Lemon, a spokesman for APHIS, told IPS.

Louisiana-Pacific officials say that they are not troubled by the court decision, since the timber company has no plans to import raw logs from Russia or any other countries right now.

“In any case we can still import timber products from Russia or other countries so long as they are processed in the country of origin,” says Bill Windes, a spokesman for the company. “What this means is less work for people at the mills here, but it will not affect our business.”

Windes also points out that the processing of wood in Russia may, in fact, cause other environmental problems. “They use methyl bromide…which is an ozone-depleting substance and is being phased out of use here in California,” he said.

Environmentalists are also concerned with conditions at treatment facilities in Russia.

Several environmental groups say that shipments are routinely mixed up, so that treated logs and other timber are often left out in Russian ports for months at a time, with the likelihood that pests feast on them. And some heat treatment facilities do not work because of a lack of electricity.