It’s that time of the year when some South Africans get a little crafty with their Christmas tree shopping, and I’ve seen two bitter arguments on Facebook this week about the merits of chopping down your own pine tree.
Not sure it’s a great idea to assume you can just chop something down because it’s an alien species, especially if it’s in an area like Table Mountain National Park, but we are talking about a more largescale theft in this story.
Forestry SA say they have a real problem on their hands, with crime syndicates targeting plantations and stealing trees.
“It has literally exploded,” said Forestry SA operations manager Francois Oberholzer, demonstrating both his lack of understanding of the word “literally” and the scale of the problem.
Over to TimesLIVE:
…sophisticated theft syndicates are now targeting trees.
Thousands of trees and seedlings are stolen annually from plantations, off the back of logging trucks and out of timber yards.
The country’s timber industry, according to insiders, is worth an estimated R10bn a year…
Transvaal Wattle Growers’ Co-operative (TWK-AGRI) timber theft investigator Gert Erasmus said there was a definite increase in the crime.
“At the moment it is a total free-for-all. The thieves feed legitimate markets, predominantly linked to the housing construction industry.”
Erasmus says that it’s a lucrative business for the thieves, who either target trucks transporting trees (ash-in-transit joke, anyone?), or raid the plantations themselves:
“They use five-man teams, who collectively can harvest up to 500 trees in a day from a single plantation. They raid multiple plantations simultaneously, stealing thousands of trees a day,” Erasmus said.
“The syndicate gets a R110 per tree. They make thousands of rands and are seldom caught because they target the centre of the plantation where they are out of sight.
“The other method of theft happens on the edge of forests where thieves, usually at night, cut down trees bordering roads. The plantation thefts are only noticed when owners conduct their inspections, usually long after the theft has happened. The biggest losses occur in plantations.”
Some timber transporters say they are losing as much as R170 000 a month through theft from their trucks. In order to fight back, agricultural co-operatives have installed cameras in hot spots, as well as using geolocator trackers on some trees.
There you are, just wanting to be a lumberjack (mandatory Monty Python link), and next thing you’re dealing with geolocators.
Companies that use timber have now been told to watch out for dodgy dealings, and are looking at increasing other security measures to better assist with curbing the problem.
[source:timeslive]
