Pyongyang, June 18 (KCNA) — In the past, the Japanese imperialists plundered the forest resources of Korea.

The Japanese imperialists organized a log plunder mechanism with an aim to satisfy the demand for logs for paper, timber, shipbuilding, buildings and railway sleepers and robbed logs in an organized way through it.

After the promulgation of the “forest law”, they made 2.2 million hectares of forests with good forestry conditions their properties in less than two years. They also issued the “Forest Survey Act” and plundered more than 13 million hectares of forests in two years. Such facts clearly showed the cunning and brutality of the Japanese imperialists.

The Japanese imperialists took big financial groups and businesses into Korea to select the forests with good timber conditions among the forests of Korea and to fall big trees on a large scale and carry them to Japan. In particular, they made desperate efforts to fill up the shortage of timbers when many buildings including houses, factories and schools were destroyed and incinerated due to the great Kanto earthquake on September 1, 1923.

From the early 1930s to the days of their defeat in 1945, the Japanese imperialists plundered more than one million cubic meters of timbers in Kyongsong County of Korea alone.

Such atrocities of the Japanese imperialists had a harmful effect on Korea.

Pulp, paper, timber and furniture industries and agriculture could not develop and, entering the 1920s, flooding had frequently occurred, causing immeasurable damage to the Korean people.

The plunder of forest resources was only a part of misfortune and sufferings imposed by the Japanese imperialists on the Korean people for the past decades.