Underpaid Workers in Georgia Risk Their Lives for Christmas Trees

In their search of the fir cones seeds that produce the most liked Christmas trees in Europe, Georgian workers climb daunting heights and risk their lives for an extremely low income while foreign importers fill their pockets, a report by the Guardian found Monday.

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“I try to not think of anything up there, just focus. The problem is, if you lose concentration, then you might fall,” Ramaz Chelishvili, who has been for years climbing to the top of the trees making the cones fall to the ground, told the Guardian.

Each fall just before winter, the Ambrolauri forest in Georgia’s northern high mountains, attracts hundreds of people who come from nearby small towns and villages in search of fir cones, or more specifically, the seeds that are inside.

Once transported to Europe and planted in its soils, those seeds will produce the tall, green and gracious Nordmann fir, which is Europe’s preferred Christmas tree. A very important market as 150 million Christmas trees are sold every year on the continent, with more than a third of them coming from Ambrolauri.

The Georgian cone pickers, however, risk their lives gathering the cones and see little of the final earnings.

“I was practically born in the forest, and have been climbing since I was a kid,” Lasha Sopromadze told the British newspaper.

Sopromadze says he earns between 1,000 and 2,000 lari (US$339 - US$679) each season. 

“The foreign companies earn most from this. We just have the cones, no factories or plantations,” Violeta Katsitadze, from the village of Tlugi at the skirt of the forest, explained.

Several people have died over the past two decades, and the 1990s saw two tragic deaths, a 16-year-old boy and 26-year-old Gaga Namgaladze, whose brother later became the mayor of the city of Ambrolauri.

“He fell 150 feet (45 meters), to his death when a branch broke. He had no chance,” Rati Namgaladze remembered.

Some companies say they are trying to implement stronger safety measures. The company Fair Trees, for instance, holds safety training with their climbers, while the company Levinsen & Abies this year brought new ropes and harnesses. 

Fair Trees also set several social projects, including a free dental clinic and breast cancer check-ups. They pay their climbers five lari (US$1.75) per kilo of cones which is significantly more than others.

Yet the industry’s wealth still has a lot to do to really help to improve the lives of the people in Ambrolauri. The municipality taxes every kilo of cones at an equivalent of US$19, but no one controls how much is harvested.

“We need better traceability tools, and the tax should also be raised,” says Maia Chkhobadze of the ministry of environmental protection and agriculture, in Tbilisi.