sami

A huge cargo of pulp and paper made from wrecked ancient forests has been blocked from leaving Finland today by Greenpeace activists.

Metsähallitus, the Finnish state-owned logging company, has unilaterally terminated all negotiations with the Sami reindeer herding co-operatives and has said that the logging moratorium on 90,000 hectares of important reindeer grazing forests is over. Logging could restart as early as August.

In May Greenpeace closed our Forest Rescue Station (FRS) located at Inari, Lapland, having achieved our objective of temporarily ending logging on valuable forest lands and in anticipation of talks on the future of the forests that were scheduled for June.

A group of Europen writers have arrived at our Forest Rescue Station, situated 300 kilometres norh of the Arctic Circle in northern Finland, to see for themselves the effect of relentless logging on the last Sàmi reindeer forests. The Sàmi are indigenous reindeer herders who rely on Lapland's remaining old-growth forests to provide vital food for their herds during the cold winter months. The reindeer forests have been reduced piece by piece by the government's own logging company, Metsähallitus, which carries out most of the logging in Lapland.