Enviros Blast Russia For Plundering Sakhalin Island

by Danielle Knight

Located north of Japan in Russia's Far East, Sakhalin was once a harsh place of exile for tsarist-era prisoners. Now the island is seen by regional politicians as the ticket to economic prosperity for the Russian Far East because of huge deposits of oil and natural gas off the northern coast.

Responding to a deepening economic crisis, Sakhalin's authorities, just like regional officials throughout the Russian Far East, are facilitating large-scale extraction and export of natural resources to generate short-term, hard currency revenues.

Its forests located in the center of the 960 kilometer-long island are also now being cut for export at an increasing pace as demand for raw timber from Japan and Korea increase.

But because Pres. Vladimir Putin abolished the State Committee on Ecology and Forest Service in May, environmental protection regulations governing oil and timber exploitation will not be adequately enforced, says Vladislav Vaklov, an activist with Sakhalin Environment Watch, the island's only local environmental organization.

"We used to work with the State Committee on Environment to help us hold companies accountable for illegal logging operations, but now that this agency has been abolished enforcement of environmental laws will be much less," says Vaklov, who is here this week for a conference on environmental threats to the Russian Far East and Siberia.

The forests of the Russian Far East, including those on Sakhalin Island, contain most of the remaining "frontier" or pristine forest areas of Russia. Russia's forests represent about 25 percent of the world's remaining forests and more than half of the earth's coniferous forests.

Vaklov believes that if every logging operation were investigated on Sakhalin, almost all would be found in violation of regional or federal legislation.

"Over-cutting trees, cutting outside the designated area and cutting on steep areas are all against the law, but very common," he says.

Sakhalin ports export a total of 400,000 to 500,000 cubic meters of timber each year, according to a report released at the conference by California-based Pacific Environment and Resources Center (PERC), Friends of the Earth-Japan, and the Bureau for Regional Oriental Campaigns, based in Vladivostok.

A number of unequipped and uncontrolled export points that deliver timber directly to Japan and are suitable for small ships and barges have sprung up on remote sections of the coast along Sakhalin, says the report.

The export-driven logging industry provides few benefits for local logging communities, according to a 1999 investigation by Sakhalin Environment Watch and PERC. The investigation found that Russian loggers are often forced to work under conditions akin to slavery.

During a visit to a logging site in the southern portion of Sakhalin, the organization determined that the logging brigade -- made up of eight people -- earned only 18 rubles (75 cents) per cubic meter logged. The wood itself would be sold to Japan for $70 to $100 per cubic meter.

"Unfortunately, entrepreneurs then send the profits out of the country -- part of Russia's capital flight -- rather than reinvesting in the local community," says the report.

Weather conditions in the Okhotsk Sea, east of Sakhalin, are much harsher than in the North Sea and the waters around the island are icebound six months out of the year.

In 1890, the Russian writer Anton Chekhov visited the island and wrote that its inhabitants -- prisoners and their guards -- were anxious to get out of the living hell.

Sakhalin also suffers from earthquakes. In 1995, the island experienced one of the worst earthquakes in Russian history. Tremors measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale flattened the oil settlement of Neftegorsk near the northern tip of the island and killed about 2,000 people, or two-thirds of the city's inhabitants.

These days, many of the island's 710,000 residents continue to flee this inhospitable area. Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, about 75,000 people have left Sakhalin.

But even the island's earthquakes and harsh icebound winters have not deterred foreign oil companies from seeking to exploit reserves located on the offshore shelf, estimated to contain some 700 million tons of oil and condensate and 2.5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

While government authorities and multinational oil companies have focused attention on speeding ahead with developing Sakhalin's oil and gas fields, little attention has been paid to increasing the island's capacity to prevent and respond to oil spills that could threaten productive fisheries in the Okhotsk Sea, say environmentalists.

In September 1999, the residents of the island learned that oil had spilled from the Vityaz Marine Terminal which is part of the Sakhalin II project, a joint oil drilling venture of Sakhalin Energy Investment Company and Royal Dutch Shell.

While the exact amount of the oil spill is not known, Sakhalin Environment Watch is currently seeking funding for a research project that would investigate the impact of the oil spill and other pollution caused by oil drilling at Sakhalin II, which has been in operation now for one year. Sakhalin II has been allowed to dump drilling muds and waste, without any processing, directly into the Okhotsk Sea.

"Drilling muds are highly toxic and contain bromide and heavy metals," says Vaklov.

Environmentalists fear that the drilling will harm the ecology of the Okhotsk Sea, one of the world's most biologically rich seas.

The people of the Russian Far East harvest crab, shrimp, pollock and other seafood from Okhotsk. Native people, who have inhabited the island for thousands of years, depend on the sea for food.

The coastlines of the sea still provide spawning grounds for wild Pacific salmon that are in decline in other parts of the North Pacific, according to Xanthippe Augerot, director of conservation programs for the Wild Salmon Center, based in Oregon, who is also here for the conference.

The island may already be seeing the impact of the oil drilling, says Vaklov. In 1999, about 50,000 tons of dead herring washed up on its northeastern shore.

"We don't know what caused this, but indigenous people who have been fishing here for generations said they have never seen anything like this before," he says.