Belarusian seeds, on the other hand, cost only 180 euros per kilo. If there are almost 130,000 germinating seeds in a kilo, the price of the seed is about half a cent, the plant costs the final buyer 40 times more.
«However, the Harju District Court and Postimees’s representatives have extensive documentation proving the legality of the movement of seeds and plants in our company and ruling out the use of such a system in our company,» Vaasma confirms. The same delivery notes from the German plant have been submitted to the court and to Postimees as documents listing the plants from Estonia, Belarus, etc., but it does not say where one or the other plant was taken. Several questions remain unanswered.
Keit Kasemets: The Environment Board must put its house in order!
Keit Kasemets, Chancellor of the Climate Ministry
My message from the beginning has been that the documents and papers must be in order and that the Environmental Board must be convinced that the seedlings grown elsewhere are from Estonian seed and arrive here as required by the European Union regulation.
The Environmental Board has taken measures to ensure that the papers are in order. And according to my information, they have also made a decision that if there are no papers according to European legislation, it is not possible to bring seedlings to Estonia.
The Environmental Board has to put its affairs in order there. According to my information, the Environmental Board has taken measures to find out more about the circumstances of the expiry of the infringement proceedings.
The supervision of the Environment Board is a bigger problem, it is not just about seedlings, another good example is biofuels. It is very difficult for the Environmental Board to do its work because it does not know when these batches will come to Estonia. It is very difficult to physically check something based on papers. We are planning to strengthen the monitoring so that the Environmental Board has more rights and information about when the physical quantities arrive.
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Rainer Vakra: If all the necessary documents are not present, the import permit will not be granted
Rainer Vakra, Director General of the Environment Board
It is clear that in the case of plants grown outside Estonia, it is particularly important to make sure that the plants are really grown from seeds of Estonian origin. Because of the doubts that have arisen, we are paying special attention to the origin of imported plants. I have asked the Internal Control Advisor to review and assess the adequacy of the Agency’s own work processes and to retrospectively evaluate the course of the completed infringement proceedings.
Although international notifications are only one part of the control measures, we are tightening up our position here: in the future, forest plants cannot be brought into Estonia without all possible confirmation documents. This means that if all the documents have not been sent to the Environmental Board by the time the new batch of plants arrives, the plants will not be allowed to enter Estonian forests.
We informed the importing company in the autumn that we were tightening our controls. The company will be inspected again next week. If all doubts are not cleared and the last necessary document is not provided, the import permit will not be granted.
The Environmental Board has extended the misdemeanour procedure until the expiry date.
Until the end of 2019, seeds could be legally imported from Belarus and transported to Germany via Estonia. However, illegal transport continued after that date.
Eda Tetlov, chief forest regeneration specialist at the Environmental Board, and Olav Etverk, head of the Forest Department, said that during regular monitoring in February 2022, they discovered that Systemsseparation LTD had illegally brought spruce seeds of Belarusian origin to Estonia in 2020 (15 kg) and 2021 (30 kg). More than six million seedlings could be grown from them.
«We asked them where they had taken the seeds, and they said they had taken them to Germany,» Tetlov explains. «Then we asked them to file a report that they had taken the seeds out of Estonia. They made a report, calling it a transit through Estonia [to Germany]. We then informed the German authorities about this situation».
«There was a transit of seeds to Germany. We submitted the relevant information to the Environmental Board correctly and on time,» is Vaasma’s position on the matter. Asked where the goods were cleared by customs and how he was informed about the circulation of (prohibited) imported goods in Germany, Vaasma replied: «The Belarusian seeds were cleared by customs at the border of the European Union and handed over to Lüdemann Pflanzen».
However, this explanation contradicts the previous story about the transit to Germany – Latvia or Lithuania, which are on the EU’s external border, would have prevented the prohibited goods from being cleared in their country, but in the case of transit, the Estonian Tax and Customs Agency (MTA) would have reacted in the same way. «Customs does not check the permits for plant material in transit,» explains Kertu Laadoga, media relations specialist at the MTA. «In this case, the transport of seeds from Estonia to Germany is also a matter of trade between member states, which is not controlled by customs.»
Why was the infringement discovered so late? «According to the Plant Propagation and Variety Protection Act, import control is the responsibility of the Tax and Customs Board,» replied Olav Etverk, head of the Forestry Department at the Environmental Board.
The EU directive does not allow Belarusian seeds to be used for forest regeneration. The Environmental Board is responsible for its fulfilment. «We cannot be responsible if we cannot find out,» said Tetlov. «We found out a year later! We had the opportunity to file a misdemeanour case.»
But the procedure was more than curious. Although Etverk and Tetlov claimed to have passed on the information to the Inspectorate after the company had submitted the transit notifications (in March 2022), the Inspectorate did not initiate proceedings until nine months later.
«During the misdemeanour proceedings, statements were also taken from our competent person, information was collected from the MTA, and representatives of the company were questioned twice (in December 2022 and February 2023). However, due to the statute of limitations, the misdemeanour case was closed on 28 March 2023, as the original alleged offence was committed on 22 March 2021 – the date on which the original goods passed through customs,» explained the Environmental Board’s Supervisory Department through a spokesperson.
Why did the supervisory officials drag out the procedure and claim a strange investigation to Postimees: «Since the documents also had a UK address on them, it was not clear whether the seeds had reached the EU or went directly to the address on the documents (or moved in transit from Estonia to the UK).» However, Tetlov and Etverk had given documented information that the seeds had reached Germany?!?
The latter said that, to their knowledge, Systemsseparation has no longer brought Belarusian seeds to the European Union, and MTA added that from 2023, the requirement to submit a permit for forest seeds has been integrated into the Estonian customs tariff system.
According to Etverk and Tetlov, customs will hold the seeds until the import permit obtained from the Environmental Board is submitted. For example, researchers at the University of Agriculture received such a permit to import seeds from Ukraine for testing purposes, which, unlike reforestation, is allowed.
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