Stop Forest Reform – Save Yourself, Each Other and Our Future

With the initiative of the Caucasian Environment NGO Network (CENN), the appeal of the civil society was spread by social networks about the comments of the Minister of Energetics and Natural Resources on leasing out the forests for 49-year term. The appeal of the civil society:

“Lately, the comments of the Minister of Energetics and Natural Resources of Georgia about leasing out the forests for 49-year term were published by media sources. Minister Aleksandre Khetaguri said they will lease out the forest for long term (49 years). Khetaguri said the initial long-term lease agreement will be ready for the end of this month and the auction will be held in the mid August.

“1, 800 million hectares of forest will be leased out,” said the Minister. It is 100 % of the forest fund of Georgia and it combines already deforested, second-hand, erosive, virgin, unique, relict forests, forest of high-conservative value, mountainous, splay, soil-protective, water-regulative, recreation, community important and in short, all sorts of forest which shall be “leased out” without preliminary evaluation, risk analysis and informing the society and population.

As a result, the state budget will be filled in for 2011-2012 and several new glass buildings will be built with the money; in parallel to it, Georgia will no longer have forests and the scale of natural disasters will double; according to official data the damage from natural disasters is average 150 million USD per year; in extremely difficult situation the damage is much more. This damage does not impact on the state budget at all because the state manages to eradicate only 1, 4% of the disaster results; and the population is responsible for the rest 98, 6% [of the damage]. The government is selling out the almost one-third of our territory in secret. The corresponding draft-law was prepared together with the Environmental and Natural Resources Committee of the Parliament of Georgia without informing not only the society, but even the deputy chairperson of the parliamentary committee. The Minister of Energetics and Natural Resources has been traveling in the regions for more than one month and has been warning the district governors for the “forest reform”. Nevertheless, he has not informed the media about planned selling of the natural resources up to recent days while big part of our meager regional population is attached to those natural resources.

The information about the intention was spread by the national TV-Channels several days ago and the society learned about the reform only from the website commersant.ge. Meanwhile, the decision and corresponding law was already adopted. The lease agreement is already ready and the auction will be held in the mid August. It is clear why they decided to hold auction in August in the so-called “dead season”. In spring of 2009, the former minister of economic development and acting environmental ministry agreed with the society to stop sale of the forests before its faults and serious ecological, economical and social risks are eradicated. More precisely, forest policy and strategy, forest inventory process and category-classification process were to be implemented before the process was renewed. The environmental ministry even proposed its vision which completely opposes the current activities of the government; the minister said the ministry is already working on the forest policy document and the ministry had spent more than half million GEL on the inventory process. The society thought the restructuring process launched by the ministry of environment and natural resources in 2011 was pre-condition of the forest adoption that resulted into assigning the forest sector to the ministry of energetics. However, the chairperson of the environmental committee spoke three hours during the public discussion of the issue and claimed that the reform had nothing to do with the decay of the state environmental functions at all.

Apparently, the ministry of energetics and natural resources of Georgia lied about a month ago and said they did not intend to renew the sale process of the forests without creating corresponding forest policy and other necessary basic documents.

The statement of the national platform of the Easter Partnership Civil Society Forum, which was lately spread, evaluates the activities of the government as ignoring and misleading the society. In addition, the government of Georgia blatantly breaches the international conventions when making similar decisions without public participation and announcing the intention on TV. Several organizations plan to respond to the fact on national and international level. However, the effort of several organizations will not be enough to hinder the almost finished process unless the society protests the intention of the government.”