“The work to preserve, restore and use forests has been implemented with substantial deviations from the plans of forest management that have been approved,” this is one of the
violations in the field of forest management discovered by the Control Chamber in 2011 and made public yesterday.
It was also mentioned in the report made by the Control Chamber that 38.169ha of forest lands have been used for non-forest purposes and they were included in the administrative and cadastral maps of communities as non-forest lands. “…The corrections are under way. It is not the violation discovered by the chamber, it is a violation discovered by us. It is well-known and I have always talked about it – it is just a complex procedure to bring it back, because when they give it to the community, they give it based on a decision and if they take it back from the community, there must be a decision of the community council etc. There had been such deviations 7 years before drawing up the temporary diagrams of communities and it was discovered when a forest management project was under way,” Ruben Petrosyan, the chief forester of the Hayantar state non-profit organization, made clarifications of the violations during a conversation with www.aravot.am.
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As for another violation revealed by the Control Chamber that the amount of wood stored in accordance with the types of lumbering has exceeded the amount provided for by the forest management plans, Mr. Petrosyan explained that besides the annual lumbering plan approved by the Minister of Nature Protection, the necessity of lumbering arose in the process and was implemented also by the minister’s permission, “Additional lumbering is when, for example, trees under the power supply line must be cut, on which there is a decision of the government, it is mandatory… that is why there is an excess.”
The Control Chamber also discovered that because of noncompliance with the requirements in nurseries, 40% of government investments in the field were inefficient. Mr. Petrosyan clarified this saying that the year 2010 had been a tough year for agriculture and couldn’t but have an impact on forest management.
Details in the recording.VOICE216
