French forests were long the preserve of nature lovers seeking silence. Now they are attracting criminals who use theft, fraud and harassment to obtain trees for an increasingly lucrative export market, reports The Times.
Fransylva, the country’s forest owners’ association, has established a helpline for victims of the “mafia networks” that make tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of euros with each illegal shipment of wood. The officials staffing the SOS Vol de Forêt (SOS Forest Theft) line offer legal advice and encourage victims to file lawsuits with the police.
The association says gangs are felling trees — mainly oaks — in privately-owned forests across France before dispatching them through European ports to regions including Asia. The principal destination is China, where demand for oak has risen after tree-felling restrictions were imposed.
Observers say the oak traffic is causing environmental damage and hardship for small French landowners. Prices have doubled in five years and oak trunks sell for about €400 per cubic metre. A single tree can be worth €1,000.
Didier Daclin, the chairman of Fransylva in the eastern Moselle region, where 40 oak thefts have been registered in recent months, said that sometimes criminals identified an isolated forest spot where they could operate without fear of being caught. Another strategy involved buying a plot in the middle of a forest and “then felling two or three trees in the neighbouring plots. You can quite quickly fill a lorry like that and it’s almost undetectable,” he told Sud Radio.
Daclin said that gangs preyed upon elderly forest owners, pressuring and tricking them into selling their land for a third of its value.
Forest covers 31.8 per cent of metropolitan France. A quarter is publicly owned; the rest is in the hands of private individuals.
Read more of this report from The Times.