The fires in Russia - also a result of deregulation and privatization

[ConsAreLiars]

A strong argument could be made for calling this disaster Putin’s Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, then-President Putin, in consultation with the Russian timber industry, “reformed” forestry regulations, eliminating positions for rangers, making each of the remaining ones responsible for more territory, increasing paperwork so they spent hardly any time outdoors monitoring the forests—and, on the off chance that they did spot a small fire while on patrol, making it a punishable offense (a misuse of state funds) to put it out. The organization charged with extinguishing fires was the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which responded speedily and capably to the Moscow Metro bombings in March, but a 2005 reform instituted by Putin left regional emergency outfits severely underfunded.

Except for the minority who read news in papers or online, Russians would never know that shoddy, nonsensical, industry-friendly deregulation was responsible for this natural disaster as much as the weather. Instead, the vast majority get their news from television, which has been broadcasting pictures of Putin, sleeves rolled up, touring the destruction. In a particularly fine touch, the main Russian television channel broadcast a “phone call” from Putin, ostensibly on his cell phone in the middle of a pristine birch grove, to President Dmitry Medvedev, back in his ornate Kremlin office. The message was clear: Putin was in charge, and this reassured the people who had lost homes to the fires he helped cause. “Putin said they’ll build us all new houses, so it will probably happen,” one villager told the Independent.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/russia-fires.html

Nikolai Petrov, an expert at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, reckons the problem lies in the centralising of power in Moscow.


“Regional budgets are neither autonomous enough nor sufficient to let governors and regional authorities react quickly,” he said. “If there is money in the regional budget, but it wasn’t decided a year ago to use it for fighting forest fires, then nothing can be done without getting special approval.”


Does that mean if we give regional governors the money and the authority to react to environmental disasters, everything would be alright? Not according to environmentalists. “Right now regional authorities have all the power to establish their own rules in terms of forest management and fire prevention,” said Nikolai Shmatkov, WWF Russia’s coordinator of forest policy. “Though it’s true that they’re still in some sense waiting for a nod from the Kremlin.”


The transfer of responsibility for forest protection to the regions came in December 2006 with the adoption of the Forest Code. “It’s effectively destroying forest protection as an institution,” ecologist Mikhail Kreindlin told Radio Svoboda. It also handed landowners and forest users a major role in conservation, “vesting protection of the Khimki forest with those who are now chopping it down,” commentator Yulia Latynina said on Ekho Moskvy radio. Latynina has blamed the government for caving into pressure from paper producers and property developers, who have been roundly attacked for wilfully draining the wetlands, especially in the Moscow region, contributing to fire risk.


The first step towards full deregulation came in 2000, when the Federal Forestry Agency was absorbed into the Agriculture Ministry. Then the Forest Rangers Service was disbanded in 2005 for financial reasons, leading to a massive drop in the number of people patrolling Russia’s woodlands and working on fire prevention. “In the Astrakhan region there used to be 300 forest rangers. Now there are 11, and they deal exclusively with management issues in the office,” said Shmatkov.


The downsizing of AviaLesOkhrana, the agency that fights forest fires from the air, was almost a “joke,” said Shmatkov, adding: “It used to be a very serious, very powerful outfit.” The result is a lack of equipment, manpower and training. Many of the Emergency Situations workers currently battling the blazes are only trained in urban fire fighting.

From: http://www.mn.ru/comments/20100809/187974821.html

(edit to put 'also' in the heading)

[ConsAreLiars]

1. Well, I see the unreccers from the right have shown up even here.

I think of them as the Jackass Brigade, but calling them that to their faces is not possible, since they never need to show their faces when they unrec everything that suggests corporate domination and ownership of the whole planet is a bad thing.

Bless their tiny minds and cold hearts! They believe getting suck-up points will protect them. Or maybe their loyalty to the masters of the universe will get them some table scraps, a few crumbs. Or maybe they are just totally gullible, ignorant, blind, stupid, and easily manipulated by the TV machine.