19 November 2003 00:32
Russian ministry proposes subsidies to support environmental investments
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade suggests that the government return the money to nature.
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade has proposed to support environmental investments by enterprises with
subsidies from the budget. The chances that the government will adopt this idea are slim.
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade submitted to the government a programme of targeted support of
priority ecological projects and proposals to reform the payment for causing a negative impact on the environment.
Together with growth in industry, the impact on ecology would also rise, the programme notes. In 2002 the number of
incidents of extremely high air pollution caused by factories rose 6 per cent, Vsevolod Gavrilov, the chief of the
administration of economics of the environment and natural resources, notes.
Gref's department proposes to support ecological projects by using direct budget subsidies, subsidizing the
interest rate on loans, and returning the ecological payment to enterprises. The projects that the ministry intends to
support should reduce total discharge and discharge per unit of output by at least 20 per cent, and the discharge of
especially dangerous toxic substances by 60 per cent. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade proposes to collect
the "ecological" payments only for discharges of harmful substances above the norms, and all norms would be
recalculated.
In 2001 the "environmental harm tax" gave budgets roughly R10.5bn, while in 2002 the figure was about R5bn.
Many enterprises stopped making the payment after the Supreme Court decided that it can only be instituted by law, and
not by decision of the Ministry of Natural Resources. But the Constitutional Court did not agree with the Supreme Court,
and companies had to pay once again. But now it is the government rather than the Ministry of Natural Resources that
sets the norms. In 2003 enterprises will pay roughly R8.5bn, believes Amirkhan Amirkhanov, a department chief at the
Ministry of Natural Resources.
In Russia standard payments have been established for acceptable and above-norm discharges of 210 agents into the air
and 142 into the water. So a tonne of active chlorine discharged into the water would cost an enterprise R27,548,091,
while a tonne above the norm would cost R137,740,455. In each region the payments are collected in accordance with the
particular coefficient.
The Ministry of Natural Resources does not support its colleagues' initiative. And enterprises are not expecting
that their defenders will be successful. "We are in favour of these subsidies, but the budget will be
opposed," says Sergey Alekseyev, the deputy general director of Nornikel [Norilsk Nickel]. In his opinion, first
the problem of returning the ecological payment to enterprises must be resolved. "These payments dissolve into the
budget, and then it is impossible to return them to an investment project," Nikolay Tonkov, the head of the Russian
Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs ecology working group, agrees.
Nikolay Arkhipov, Severstal's chief ecologist, proposes that the ecological payment not be transferred to the
budget at all. "Let enterprises spend them on ecology, and if the money is not spent for the designated purpose,
let officials collect it along with a penalty," he said. In 2003 Severstal's discharges have declined but the
environmental harm tax has remained the same for the company (roughly R80 million), because the coefficient and the
rates have changed, Arkhipov says indignantly.
[Vedomosti] |
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