The Ministry of Industry and Trade considers pulp and paper mills construction in the Far East to be inefficient

“All the calculations on pulp and paper mills construction in the Far East are available; we can see that these investments are inefficient so far,” Oleg Bocharov, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, said on June 24, 2021, at the round table in the Federation Council. Deputy Minister also spoke of insufficient pulp wood recycling in the Far Eastern Federal District. In his opinion, a financial arrangement supporting about 50,000 harvesting enterprises is more profitable; it involves recycling hard-to-sell wood at wood pellets production sites and having the respective tariff, and also chips production to eliminate logistics expenses.

Andrey Goncharov, Vice President of Russian Forest National Association of Timber Industry, had previously proposed at the round table to consider pulp and paper mills construction in Far Eastern regions with government participation, when economic measures aimed at enforcing the ban of exporting unprocessed and roughly processed softwood and precious hardwood timber from the Russian Federation had been discussed.