Finland joins the Golden Chainsaw hall of infamy
It's not awards season but what the hell. We're always ready to dish out the gongs, particularly when poor environmental track records are going unrewarded. There's nothing like an oddly-shaped statuette to give credit where credit is due. The Golden Chainsaws are becoming something of a Greenpeace tradition. They're not annual, they're not voted for by a secret cabal of society members, but when it comes to wanton destruction of forest landscapes, they ensure the efforts of those responsible do not go unremarked.
Previous recipients have included Brazilian soya magnate Blairo Maggi and Malaysian timber trashers Rimbunan Hijau, but today our Finnish colleagues went one better and bestowed the ultimate honour on their entire government.
Juha Korkeaoja, Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, refused to accept the award. Hardly surprising when Finland's role as a back door into Europe for illegal Russian timber has just been exposed in a Greenpeace report. Or maybe he was just terrified of the giant inflatable chainsaw that appeared outside the conference centre he was visiting.
Still, he and the rest of the government should have got the message. Following the release of the report, the Finnish government just said they couldn't do anything about it, it wasn't up to them, nothing to do with me guv'nor. Then in response to the award, they released a statement to explain how forest friendly they are and how proactive they've been in pushing forward European legislation to ban illegal timber coming into the EU. But the truckloads of dodgy Russian timber crossing the Finnish border every day tell a different story.
