The consequences of the construction of the Amazar Central Plant have not received an objective assessment, and now the nature and population of the Tungiro-Olekminsky district of the Trans-Baikal Territory are under threat

The consequences of the construction of the Amazar Central Plant have not received an objective assessment, and now the nature and population of the Tungiro-Olekminsky district of the Trans-Baikal Territory are under threat

Residents of the village of Tupik, the capital of the Tungiro-Olekminsky district of the Trans-Baikal Territory, ask the authorities not to give 15-20 thousand square kilometers of taiga-nurse for Chinese pulp production ... Half of the district is leased for the total processing of taiga into wood chips, which is so necessary for the Amazar pulp mill and created in the neighboring Mogochinsky area by the Chinese company TsPK "Polyarnaya", it is also "Sin Bang". Last year, Novaya Gazeta wrote about the falsification of public hearings on the project of the plant, and then about the attempt by the Polyarnaya CPC to declare experts helping the new leadership of the district to assess the benefits and harms of the plant as "foreign agents".

"Taiga Way" in Dead End

A single road leads to the area, ending in the village of Tupik. The main problems of the Evenks of the Tungiro-Olekminskiy district are the difficulties in obtaining education and employment, the lack of prospects for the development of traditional agriculture. Of the 1,500 residents of the district, less than 100 people are officially employed, another 200 are hunters from the Taiga Way community. The Evenks continue to engage in traditional hunting, but in fact they have ceased to breed deer. Now there is only one herd in the region, in which there are only 40 heads.

Back in November 2013, the region’s forest management notified the region that about half of the region’s area, the most valuable, untouched forests, was being leased to Chinese companies. According to Irina Petrovna Glazyrina, head of the laboratory of ecological economics, doctor of economic sciences, the provision of land plots for logging on the lands of traditional nature management directly contradicts the legislation of the Russian Federation. In addition, the initiators of the Amazar CZ project from the very beginning stated that forest waste and low-value timber, which is enough in the Trans-Baikal Territory, will serve as raw materials for it. The forests of the Tungiro-Olekminsky district were less affected by fires and therefore perform the most important ecological and water regulating functions that other forests have already largely lost. Leasing them out for logging is at least short-sighted.

Russia has just participated in the UN Conference on Indigenous Peoples in New York, where all countries reaffirmed the unshakable principle of "obtaining voluntary, advance consent for industrial activities in the territories of indigenous communities." True, the authorities did not allow half a dozen Russian and Crimean Tatar activists of the indigenous peoples to attend that conference, blocking their exit from the country. But the Evenks of Tupik, at least for the time being, are the quietest and most obedient people, and completely dependent on the authorities. In the face of a complete loss of the community's livelihood, in their appeal they ask Governor Ilkovsky and Chairman of the Legislative Assembly Zhdanova to simply send a commission to assess the scale of the impact of the planned forestry bacchanalia on the ecological balance and conditions for the survival of the population. The message says: with deforestation, people will lose "natural resources, game animals, fish resources, wild plants will disappear" ...

It is symptomatic that, having received an appeal, no one from the regional government came to the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the village of Tupik in early November. True, just in time for the centenary, the governor instructed to connect the area to the power grid, but perhaps this is just a necessary element of pre-sale preparation. Only the leaders of the neighboring Mogochinsky district were at the celebration, who are connected with their neighbors by friendship, a common road to Dead End, and now also a common problem of survival in the face of colonization ...

Amazar cancer cells

About 40% of the territory of the Mogochinsky District is already leased from Chinese loggers for a period of 49 years. Although forests were historically rented, meaning, as it were, to provide a pulp mill, the real point was ... in the export of commercial timber to China. Under the previous governor, the Pokrovka-Louguhe border crossing was even "pierced" here, the only purpose of which is to ensure the export of round timber that cannot be counted. The crossing was closed with a big scandal after 10 years of uncontrolled exploitation in 2008, which caused bewilderment and displeasure of the Chinese neighbors, who had just introduced a complete ban on logging on their side and were in dire need of raw materials for the stopped timber processing industries.

Soon, the process of creating the Amazar Pulp Mill was revived, the agreement on which was signed back in 2003 and was considered just a fig leaf covering a forest robbery.

The project of an extremely hazardous production facility, located on the most important tributary of the Amur for the region, the Amazar River, was dismantled by the designers into separate components: the plant itself, a dam with a reservoir, a settlement for 2000 visiting workers and forest development projects in 3-4 districts. These projects did not pass the environmental review and were not approved at public hearings. However, the “positive results” of the hearings on the plant itself were falsified by the district authorities and designers in 2013, and the repeated demands to consider the full range of consequences of the creation of this production are still ignored by the customer with the connivance of the authorities.

Over the 10 years of designing and building the Polyarnaya TsPK complex, the population and the Chinese owners of the enterprise have completely lost their illusions about each other and the possibilities of peaceful coexistence. With an official commitment to hire at least half of the local labor force, 50 Russians and more than 250 Chinese are currently employed in all works to create the Amazar plant. Most of the hard workers who are still hired leave within the first six months due to the extremely unfriendly attitude of the employer and the obvious lack of any prospects for improving wages and working conditions. It is quite obvious that the local population is completely unnecessary, and even interferes with the Chinese owners, just as it is equally unnecessary and brings unnecessary troubles and expenses to the regional and federal authorities, and in the case of the Tungiro-Olekma region, the Evenks, frankly, interfere with the priority international project economic development.

Guarantor of social stability

In July, after a year and a half of struggle, Alexander Seleznev, the head of the village of Amazar, was finally removed from his post in court, and a criminal case was initiated against him. In addition to the already documented appropriation of state funds, revealed by the Control and Accounts Commission, it is widely believed that the “Chinese” built a house for him. The folklore included a story about how Alexander Lukyanovich sold the inhabitants of the village a croaker, given by the Chinese free of charge, "for the needy."

The newly elected head of the Mogochinsky district, formerly a human rights activist and well-known blogger, Dmitry Plyukhin, decided to assess with the help of the Control and Accounts Commission of the Mogochinsky district: does the benefit of Amazar from Chinese investments offset the harm from the activities to create a plant? At his request, the Polyarnaya CPC announced the expenditure of 25 million rubles as part of the socio-economic partnership for 2011 and 2012. Here are the repair of the school, and the repair of the roof of the building, and the repair of roads: they managed to find traces of only 5 million Chinese rubles invested in the village, and where the village and district authorities spent the rest, they could not find out.

The trouble is that the establishment of "special relations" between the new regional authorities and the Polyarnaya CTC, with all their mutual dislike, is only a matter of time. And the point is not corruption at all, but the fact that the richest region has been robbed to the skin by the Russian system of income distribution, and you can’t find yourself in federal and regional authorities for every little need. Accordingly, "sponsors" are needed who will repair the roof of the kindergarten, subsidize the sports festival, ensure uninterrupted heating of social facilities, and the like. The “Chinese” are the most ideal sponsors, because they always have a small amount of money available to help the aboriginal leadership, and they always try to help. As the gold mines and other flagships of the district economy “sink” under the yoke of economic hardships, the Polyarnaya CPC, insured against a general collapse by Chinese subsidies, is becoming an increasingly important guarantor of the survival of the district’s social sphere.

Tax incentives - the flagship of the economy

The regional authorities, headed by Konstantin Ilkovsky, who recently arrived from Yakutia, are in a similar position. The predecessor left Ilkovsky with a crumbling rotten dummy of a Potemkin village, and the decline in world demand for resources, coupled with the upheavals of the Russian economy, caused a domino effect in the Transbaikal industry. A wave of refusals or bankruptcies of mining industries passed along the region: in the best cases, they were conceded for a pittance to Chinese investors, and in the worst cases, they simply folded. The flagship of the domestic uranium production, the Priargunsky Mining and Chemical Combine, fired half of the workers and curtailed part of the production. And this is not the end.

The forest sector of Transbaikalia, according to economist Glazyrina, is also in a coma. The specialist says that for the rational use of local resources, it is necessary to create modern timber processing industries. Economists consider the production of fuel products based on wood raw materials and the development of wood chemistry to be more promising. This does not require giant factories, but it does require "appropriate conditions and motivations."

As if for this purpose, Konstantin Ilkovsky proposed to the Legislative Assembly of the region a draft law providing for a halving of taxes on property acquired during the implementation of investment projects. The only project that falls under the scope of this law is the project to create a pulp and industrial plant "Polyarnaya". Lost revenues of the regional budget in connection with the provision of benefits will amount to 167.7 million rubles.

Forest Blackmail and Death Road

Of all the planned "metastases" of the pulp mill, the most important is the border crossing. The government of Heilongjiang province needs not so much a plant as a direct transition to the Trans-Baikal Territory in order to pump out natural resources from there directly without intermediaries. In January 2014, they tried to “temporarily open” the crossing under the pretext of importing “large equipment”, but after journalists demonstrated that local roads were only suitable for exporting roundwood, and not for importing complex oversized technological units, the issue was hushed up .

Recently, Chinese loggers themselves have given up half a million hectares leased for logging around the Amazar Pulp Plant under construction in the Mogochinsky District. Formally, the tenants refer to the need for millions of annual lease payments and the inability to sell wood, since the plant is still under construction and will not start operating until 2017, and Russian Railways prices and duties make it pointless to export timber to China. In addition, the state is trying to return the most crippled forests, where the real stock of timber is several times less than the official forest management figures, on the basis of which the rent is calculated.

Trans-Baikal local historian Oleg Korsun expressed concern that this was actually a temporary refusal in order not to pay rent until the opening of the Amazar pulp mill. And this is if it works at all, because it is possible that the refusal to lease is an attempt to put pressure on the Russian authorities in order to push through the opening of the crossing for the export of timber as such. The eminent local historian looked into the water: at the beginning of November 2014, Konstantin Ilkovsky and the head of the Chinese province of Heilongjiang “discussed again” the opening of the Pokrovka-Louguhe checkpoint and the construction of a bridge across the Amur there, but in order for the Russian partner to “get into position” better, it was preventive demonstrated willingness to abandon forest leases.

Development prospects

So, the Polyarnaya CPC "sets the bar" for relations between the Trans-Baikal Territory, the local population and the Chinese investor for all future projects.

The Minister of Natural Resources and Industrial Policy of Transbaikalia, Oleg Polyakov, who accompanied the governor in China, gave a lengthy interview to Zabmedia about a brighter future when he returned to his homeland. In it, the minister says that the Chinese are ready to take about a million hectares of agricultural land and, together with us, "fight for an environmentally friendly product." The Chinese side, according to Polyakov, is already designing the construction of a Chinese coal chemistry plant aboard the Urtui mine, and for investors who will work along the border with China and carry out geological exploration, search, appraisal, production, processing, a special land use regime and the establishment of preferential rates are provided. rent.

The minister also did not forget about the Amazar project: they say, it’s not the end of the world, we’ll wait until the tenants procure all the wood, and then re-establish nature reserves there.

Thus, in the conditions of sanctions and inflation going through the roof, there are no other prospects but to surrender to China with enthusiasm - the Trans-Baikal Territory is not visible.