Karelian Birch: How Belarus Became the Main Supplier of the "Karelian" Brand
Karelian birch in a northern forest. Source: iStock.com/Renewer
Karelian birch is listed today in the Red Data Book of the Republic of Karelia, and commercial logging of the species is banned. At the same time, the region promotes Karelian birch as a brand: souvenir shops sell every kind of article made from it—chess sets, jewelry boxes, stands. Where does the wood for all this splendor come from, when the price tags start no lower than 15,000 rubles (about $175)? The answer is almost funny: from Belarus.
PARTS
- Why Is Karelian Birch So Hard to Grow?
- Karelian Birch: How Belarus Became the Main Supplier of the “Karelian” Brand
Karelian birch grows not only in Karelia but also in the Leningrad, Pskov, and Yaroslavl regions and elsewhere across the European north of Russia, as well as in Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The Republic of Belarus today holds the largest part of the species’ range. Forestry there still runs on principles inherited from the Soviet Union, and it is Belarus that carries out the moderate harvesting, processing, and supply of the individual items that are then sold in Karelia at an enormous markup.
So why did Karelia give up its position? The influence of the Second World War, surprisingly, is still felt here. An irreplaceable part of the “native” gene pool of Karelian birch was lost during the German-Finnish occupation. Karelia did have a chance to grow Karelian birch on an industrial scale of its own, but the lawless nineties and human greed spared none of the rare plantings.
According to Natalia Laur, doctor of agricultural sciences, an enormous amount of breeding work was carried out in Karelia between 1987 and 2006, and 40 hectares of hybrid Karelian birch plantings with a high yield of figured wood were established.1 These valuable breeding sites now require regular maintenance, but the region allocates no funding for it. The single plus stand—one whose average indicators exceed those of ordinary stands—had been lost to illegal logging as of 2012, and the number of individual plus trees keeps falling: by 2012 only about 40% of all the plus trees designated in the region remained.
The habitats of Karelian birch have been designated regional nature reserves, sites under state protection where cutting Karelian birch is strictly forbidden. Regional authorities established a special legal regime within them, yet the breeding value of most plantings and natural stands has been lost: the markings are gone, and without maintenance the valuable species cannot compete and disappears from the stand.
Some reserves have been destroyed outright, and Karelian birch there is gone for good. A lack of funding for forest breeding, together with the closure of the Karelian Selection and Seed Production Center in 2008, led to the loss of 1,500 trees between 1996 and 2006.
The Problem Today
Karelian birch has been used in the landscaping of Petrozavodsk since the 1980s, though far from all residents support the practice, as they do not consider the species ornamental.
Karelia has now taken up the conservation and cultivation of Karelian birch as a commercial species once again. In September 2024, the first forest plantation of Karelian birch appeared in the Medvezhyegorsk District.
Plantation cultivation of forest plants is permitted in Russia but is nowhere near as widespread as it is abroad. Foreign plantation practice is highly profitable: in Germany, Poland, Finland, and a number of other European countries, fast-growing willow and poplar are grown for fuel chips. In Russia, very few households have boilers that run on fuel pellets, and firewood is often cheaper and easier to come by than pellets and the boilers themselves, which are extremely expensive to install and maintain, so Russian pellet production is oriented entirely toward export. In China, for example, poplar plantations are established for parquet board and cheap plywood, and the fastest-growing species in the world, eucalyptus, is grown on plantations in Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, and a number of other countries.
Forest plantations have not caught on widely in Russia, because the country’s fuel needs are met by gas and firewood, which are relatively cheaper than boilers and pellets, and because domestic demand for timber at export prices is very low. Even so, the situation may well change before long, and plantation cultivation may take a place of its own in Russian forestry.
The leased land, the funding of the planting stock, and the obligation to maintain the Karelian birch plantation all fall to PJSC Segezha Group. Karelia’s largest logging holding has clearly made a long-term “investment” here in the hope of harvesting Karelian birch, since under Russian forest law the ban on cutting a Red Data Book species does not extend to plantation cultivation.
Whether “test-tube” plants can form a full plantation is an open question, since a forestry asset of that value needs careful tending.
Conclusion
Conserving and reviving Karelian birch in Russia plainly calls for strong support from the state. Restoring the old reserves and creating new ones is overdue.
Breeding work in the modern world does not stop for a day—grocery shelves now carry grapes the size of a large date, and laboratories are experimenting with jellyfish genes in citrus—so why can the country not revive and develop the breeding of valuable tree species at home? The result of breeding Karelian birch will take decades to appear, of course, but it is worth treating as a long-term investment that will certainly pay for itself and benefit generations to come.
Footnotes
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N. V. Laur, Forest Breeding and Seed Production in Karelia: A Monograph, Petrozavodsk State University (Moscow: Moscow State Forest University Press, 2012), 160 pp. ↩
