KEY POINTS:
Next time you complain about waiting in a queue, spare a thought for Pavel.
He has parked his truck in a line stretching for 5km - and this is a good day at the Finnish-Russian border.
Russia's economy is booming and its hunger for new cars, televisions and machinery means the routes through Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are clogged with trucks.
Because of this surging cross-border traffic, Finland is now as large a trading partner for Russia as the United States, but customs posts are struggling to cope.
While the vehicles are stuck at the border, retailers in Russia and the transport firms are losing money and local people are scared to drive on the roads with one lane blocked by trucks.
The Finns blame the Russians for the queues, which are also a problem in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
"Last year we had queues on 300 days," said Mika Poutiainen, head of Finnish customs at Vaalimaa, 186km east of Helsinki.
Vaalimaa is Finland's busiest border crossing to Russia, dealing with 700-800 trucks a day.
Poutiainen says Finnish customs could double the number of trucks that pass through because processing export papers takes only a couple of minutes.
"But because of the different kinds of procedures ... the limit is set by the Russian side."
Russians prefer to import goods through Finland because Russian harbours near St Petersburg do not have enough unloading equipment or warehouses, and to minimise theft.
The amount of goods imported through Finland has doubled since 2002 to about 3 million tonnes in 2006 and Russia's Transport Ministry admits its officials cannot handle the growing number of vehicles.
Finnish President Tarja Halonen, who met Russia's Vladimir Putin last month, said Russia had made decisions that would help to improve border traffic but had not carried them out fully.
This month, the Prime Ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania called for Brussels to raise the problems at border crossings at the next EU-Russia summit.
Latvia has queues of between 700 and 1000 trucks regularly waiting at the two main crossing points to Russia, and processing takes between 60 and 72 hours.
Last month trucks stood in a queue for more than a week in Estonia.
The situation in Latvia got so bad that in April a local region declared a state of emergency to draw central Government's attention to its needs.
Poutiainen said electronic customs declaration would end the queues.
"We don't have [that] because the agreement would have to be made between the EU and Russia, not between Finland and Russia. On the EU level we are still in talks to solve this problem."
The Finnish Government had raised the issue in the EU, Transport Minister Anu Vehvilainen said.
However, it does not expect the problem to be solved any time soon and has put aside €24 million ($44.41 million) to build a new waiting area for the trucks.
- Reuters
