Illegal logging in the Siberian Taiga

Crossing Continents Thursday, 10 April 2008 At 1102 BST on BBC Radio 4 Siberia: Illegal Logging

Crossing Continents Reporter Lucy Ash visits the Chita Oblast, home to a section of the vast woodlands of Asian Russia which hold one seventh of the world's carbon.

There she discovers the forests are being rapidly cut down, in many cases illegally, to service China's surging demand for wood.

She delves into the murky world of contract killings over the illicit wood trade and visits what Kremlin Ministers call "bandit villages", forced into breaking forestry laws by poverty.

Lucy then follows the timber flow across the border to Manzhouli in China, a gleaming new Chinese metropolis built on the wealth generated by the Siberian Forests.

BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents was broadcast on Thursday, 10 April 2008 at 1102 BST. It was repeated on Monday, 14 April 2008 at 2030 BST.

Reporter: Lucy Ash
Producer: Mukul Devichand

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