Davydov.Index, 3.09.2019

Alexander Kolotov, leader of the Green Russia faction of the Krasnoyarsk branch of Yabloko, reflects on the government decision to abandon the economic forum in Krasnoyarsk:

The Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum has outlived itself for a long time already – at least by several years. Every year, the dissonance between the bravura reports about signing of new “breakthrough” investment agreements at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum and the increasing debt of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, which turned from a donor region into a regularly subsidised subject of the Russian Federation in the course of the economic forum, has become increasingly clear.

Economic “breakthroughs” and high-profile declarations of intent often did not develop outside the forum sites. There were no cardinal changes for the better in the living standards of local residents in the region, who fell under the “Golden Rain” of investment projects promised at the forum.

But environmental degradation from the implementation of large-scale investment projects was very well felt. The flood zone of the Boguchanskaya Hydroelectric Power Station was designed to the maximum, without leaving the Angara River a free flow for self-cleaning, flooding in its waters millions of cubic meters of real Siberian taiga. Another “breakthrough” investment project signed at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum for the construction of the Yenisei Timber Chemical Complex Angara Paper ended in bankruptcy and half a billion debts.

For Krasnoyarsk, a Siberian city with a million population, choking for weeks from industrial smog or from burning large-scale forest fires, holding of the Krasnoyarsk Environmental Forum is much more relevant in order to at least somehow correct and darn those environmental gaps that the investment “breakthroughs” of the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum times left behind.

Source

ALEXANDER KOLOTOV

Member of the Yenisei Basin Council at Rosvodresursy (the Russian Water Resource Federal Agency), Chairman of the Krasnoyarsk branch of the environmental fraction of the Yabloko party.