Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 23 – In 2025, Russia’s forestry industry “collapsed to a ten-year low,” erasing the gains of earlier years, simultaneously driving down incomes and wrecking the budgets of the governments of federal subjects east of the Urals, according to Russian government figures reported by the Voice of the Regions portal.
Russian production in this sector fell to 176 million cubic meters, far below the 200 cubic meter mark that the authorities had assumed was the baseline. Indeed, the situation has become so dire that the portal entitles its report about this collapse “Taiga on the Brink” (regionvoice.ru/tayga-na-grani-lesnaya-otrasl-rossii-lesozagotovka/).
The forestry industry is not just about harvesting trees. It is an enormous system involving everything from cutting down forests to processing the wood and moving it to both domestic and foreign customers. But, according to Voice of the Regions, “when demand falls, tensions arise at every stage.”
The decline in foreign demand has not been compensated for by a rise in domestic demand, the portal says; and prices continue to rise for fuel, equipment, and infrastructure maintenance. As a result, incomes are falling and jobs disappearing all along this pathway. And regions where it is a dominant force are losing tax revenue and having to retrench.
If the current trends continue, not only will the forestry industry face more than “the temporary downturn” Moscow likes to talk about, but it and all who depend on it will have to adjust to “a more profound transformation of the development model” Russia’s forestry industry has long thought it could rely on.
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