(...) However, as Māris Čaklais once said:

And once again, from time to time
Someone reminds him,
That the song is not about shirts,
But about consciences.

Things are by no means simple in the Latvian forest industry, either. Our exports to the two aggressor states were negligible, yet our imports of raw materials were significant. Therefore, I had to answer the question posed by Ms Krūtaine while looking into the eyes of entrepreneurs who, with the disappearance of undried and otherwise unprocessed boards from Belarus and Russia from the market, are having to lay off staff from drying, planing, and other secondary processing workshops. The harsh reality is that a large portion of board imports from Belarus and Russia cannot be replaced because their specific nature was that they were relatively cheap and weakly processed. Our niche was to carry out that further processing. Some of it has been replaced by products from Sweden and other nearby countries, but generally speaking, products with such low levels of processing as those in Belarus and Russia are simply not manufactured elsewhere in Europe.

What was and is my answer? Firstly, I believe that situations where the choice must be made by the entrepreneur themselves should be avoided as much as possible. It is easy to theorize, but when you have to choose between laying off a couple of hundred employees or continuing cooperation with companies from aggressor states, an entrepreneur faces a very difficult decision. And not only that – your competitors also have to answer the same question. And not just in Latvia. Therefore, it is easy to foresee that responses and actions will differ, thus creating unfair competition.

Therefore, the Latvian Forest Industry Federation advocated for more radical solutions. Our colleagues and politicians in Europe were of a similar opinion, and since the summer, import sanctions on wood products have been in force; in the spring, Russian and Belarusian producers were stripped of their FSC and PEFC certificates, thus making sales in other global markets more difficult. This does not mean there are no attempts to bypass the sanctions. Of course there are! So far not yet in volumes that distort the market, but certificates of origin are being "faked" for various countries whose names end in -stan. Personally, I cannot fathom that certain Belarusian products are also receiving Ukrainian documents of origin. The good news is that in such cases, it is not just conscience standing guard, but also mercantile interests; specifically, other market participants do not want to experience unfair competition, so the responsible state institutions are provided with information that would be difficult for them to obtain promptly under other circumstances.