Polish MEP Tomasz Poręba has accused the European Commission of treating European Union member states differently. He asked Brussels about the extensive forest logging in Germany’s Bavaria region.
“I would like to know if the European Commission will react as firmly in this case as it did in the case of Poland’s Białowieża Forest,” Poręba, a member of the European Parliament representing Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, was quoted as saying by wpolityce.pl.
As reported by Radio Poland, German daily Die Welt as reporting last week that, according to Bavarian forestry officials, about half the area of this German federal state was at risk of bark beetle infestation.
According to the Bavarian forestry administration, the only way to stop the bark-beetle epidemic is to immediately cut down all infested trees and remove them from the forests.
Meanwhile, “the Polish government, when recently faced with a similar problem in Poland’s Białowieża Forest, was constantly attacked by EU institutions and accused of destroying biodiversity,” Poręba said in his parliamentary question addressed to the European Commission.
As previously reported, the European court of Justice ruled in April that logging in Poland’s primaeval Białowieża Forest was against EU environmental protection laws. The ruling followed a two-year row between Warsaw and Brussels.
Poland’s Białowieża Forest is home to century-old trees, the European bison and a number of bird species. The government argued that logging across 34,000 hectares, more than half of the Polish forest, was an effort to protect it.
But the European Commission claimed Poland had failed to prove that logging would not adversely affect the integrity of the ancient forest.
