13 October 2015, 16:20
In particular, the draft law No. 1748 offers to impose a ban on deforestation for the period of 50 years, and exportation of timber from Ukraine for the same period, to limit the permitted deforestation types and to introduce a term that rules to send timber received in the process of such deforestation only for the needs of consumers in Ukraine. The draft law also envisions environmental requirements as to retention, protection and regeneration of forests.
Generally supporting the idea of protection and regeneration of forests, the Committee members still expressed a number of remarks to the draft law.
In particular, they called the introduction of the moratorium for the period of 50 years not sufficiently founded as such a long ban may affect the economy on the whole and the forestry sector particularly.
Besides, the draft law contradicts a number of provisions of the effective laws:
— Article 70 of the Forest Code of Ukraine that envisions that during the final felling "damaged growing stock, the stock that dry out, other growing stock demanding immediate felling due to the state it is in, and growing stock that went from tapping" are the first to be fallen for the purposes of timber harvesting, but not for the felling aimed at forest tending, sanitary and other felling measures mentioned in Section 2 of Article 3 of the draft law;
— Article 84 of the Forest Code of Ukraine, under which the felling aimed at forest tending, sanitary and other purposes related to reconstruction of young trees of little value, etc., regard measures on improvement of qualitative composition of forests;
— provision of the Law of Ukraine "On moratorium on final felling at mountain slopes in fir-beech forests of the Carpathian area," in particular, the limitation of felling in fir-beech forests, as well as limitation of other types of felling only on separate precisely defined areas (the draft law offers felling on all areas of the forest);
— Article 17 of the Law of Ukraine "On foreign economic activity," which contains comprehensive list of cases in which ban on specific types of export and import is possible, and also defines that introduction of a ban on exportation and importation in other cases is possible only if the said is permitted by international agreements Ukraine is a party in.
The people's deputies also took in account that the draft law requires rationalization as to correspondence to the World Trade Organization's requirements.