IKEA and Poland: “Should every area of Poland’s forest suffer such brutal logging operations?”
Part VII: How IKEA's demand for timber threatens old-growth forests in Poland.
Poland was one of the first countries outside Sweden that IKEA outsourced its raw material supply and manufacturing. In the 1960s, Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder signed contracts with Polish sawmills to supply IKEA. The company also built factories in Poland, to benefit from cheap labour on top of the cheap and plentiful wood in the country.
During the Cold War, IKEA used timber from communist Poland to supply the Western capitalist middle class. Poland now supplies 32% of IKEA’s timber.
The recent Arte documentary about IKEA includes a trip to Poland. The documentary team visits a company called Mardom Home. The company was a small family carpentry business making furniture for the local market.
Until 1999 that is, when IKEA turned up.
Mardom Home now produces flat-packed furniture for IKEA which is shipped worldwide. Mardom Home makes about 600,000 pieces of furniture each year, mainly beds, but also tables.
The documentary shows the logging operations behind the company’s furniture. Trees that are 85 to 95 years old are logged to supply IKEA.
Rafal Zubkiewicz is the General Director of the National Forestry Service in Poland. He tells the documentary team that Poland’s forests are managed so that they can predict how much timber will be available in the future. The National Forestry Service determines for itself where and when the timber will be cut, and how much timber will be cut.
Recently though, there has been a public outcry about the way Poland’s forests are managed. Marta Jagusztyn coordinates a network called Forests and Citizens. “We entrusted the responsibility of the forests to others,” she says, “convinced that they would look after them carefully. That they are experts. Suddenly, that appears not to be the case at all.”
Jagusztun obtained a court order to stop logging operations close to her village. Since then she has published maps online of future logging areas, to enable local residents to take action. She says,
“We thought that our map would be used for a few dozen initiatives related to the forest. In fact, it caught the interest of the whole country. Within a week it was consulted 100,000 times! We realised that people want to be informed about what was happening in the forests near them. Every week people ask us what they can do to prevent the trees from being cut down in forests that are important to them.”
The National Forestry Service is facing serious criticism. Greenpeace Poland is involved. Citizens film logging to expose it. Others protest by stopping the forest workers and their machines.
The Carpathian mountains protest camp
The documentary makers travel to southeastern Poland, where activists set up a protest camp two years ago to stop logging in this area of the Carpathian mountains. They want to create a national park to protect the forests and the wolves, lynxes, and bears that live there.
The National Forestry Service allows logging here, to supply IKEA and other companies.
Yakub Rok is one of the organisers of the protest camp. He is a teacher at the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Warsaw University. Together with other activists, he looks for trees marked for felling that should be protected.
The area of forest they are in has been prepared for logging. According to Polish forestry code, conifers with a circumference of more than 250 centimetres should be protected. Sure enough, they find a tree marked for cutting with a circumference of 275 centimetres.
They record the GPS data and post photographs on social media to inform people about the illegal logging. Rok explains that,
“Sometimes I say that it’s like making the walls of a slaughterhouse transparent, so people can see what’s happening inside. We’ve got to show people what logging means so that they can decide whether they want to support this. Do you like this? And should every area of Poland’s forest suffer such brutal logging operations?
“This forest is so valuable and is more useful to us as a forest than as wood turned into shelves or chairs.
“The oldest and largest trees are essential for the forest because they are its foundation. Bears can climb the trees to find refuge. And they provide shelter for many other organisms and form the framework of this old-growth forest. In most places in Poland, old trees haven’t survived. They’ve been cut down in the name of forest management. Here they’ve survived, but they’re being cut down now.
“Should Polish forests really be cleared so that we can furnish homes from Portugal to China? No, I don’t think so. There comes a time when we need to stand up and say that’s enough. We can use the furniture we inherit from our grandparents. There’s no need to throw it away and replace it according to the trends imposed on us. We don’t need to change clothes, or furniture, or any object, every two or three years.”