Forestry sector representatives' proposals on the Government table

Members of the Board of Directors of ASFOR were received on Wednesday, February 8, 2024, by a team of Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, consisting of Mrs. Mihaela Frăsineanu and Mr. Daniel Botănoiu, State Advisors in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Romania. During this discussion, ASFOR presented a list of 10 measures deriving from the program "Green Romania in 10 steps":

1. Registration of machinery used in logging (forestry machinery/tractors, forwardere, skiddere, funiculare, forestry ironhorse) by requiring their registration only at the town hall, without the obligation of CIV and ITP, regardless of tonnage, with exemption from the application of the provisions in this matter for the year 2024, concomitant with the corresponding amendment of the draft law currently under debate in the Romanian Senate (ORDINANCE no. 3 of January 18, 2024);
2. Creating the conditions for the recovery of road tolls and excise duties for non-road fuel (diesel and gasoline) used in specific forest operations (estimated budgetary effort of €21 million);
3. Given the fact that the weight of wood varies greatly and that at the place of loading - in the forest - there is no possibility of weighing, ASFOR proposes that for the transportation of timber and timber products on public roads a weighing tolerance of 10% should be allowed;
4. Financing the purchase of specialized forestry equipment for clearing and thinning (the most important work to ensure the continuity of the forest) through the environmental fund available to the AFM;
5. Introducing the requirement that in public buildings wood should account for at least 201TPTP3T of the materials used;
6. To separate management activities from timber harvesting activities in state-owned forests, and to carry out logging, sorting and transport activities in state-owned forests mainly with private economic operators, and where possible to organize these services on a pool basis by contracting them for a period of 2-4 years. Timber harvesting is an economic activity and, historically, the state has proved to be much slower to adapt to the needs of the competitive market. Harvest the entire amount of timber per foot in a single auction at the beginning of the year, and publish a month and volume schedule for the milled timber;
7. Exploitation of cut timber (work/fire) from state-owned public property should be done only from video-supervised warehouses (the switch to cut timber has created a real problem of stock management in the primary stands and has implicitly led to the alteration of valuable timber), and where this is not possible, the exploitation should be done on a per-foot basis and the timber should be measured when leaving the forest;
8. Elimination of the sanction of prohibition of participation in the tender for 6 months in the case of economic operators who have terminated the parties, but with the introduction of a penalty consisting in a gradual increase in the percentage of the retained guarantee, depending on the number of terminations in the last 12 months. In order to ensure a fair, balanced and transparent market, it is necessary to implement a system of temporary forfeiture of the tender guarantee;
9. Setting up a working group to draft a Bioeconomy Law, applying the principles of the circular economy, with a view to transforming restrictive, coercive and often environmentally ineffective environmental obligations into working tools that enable the sustainable exploitation of the timber resource and combat the effects of climate change (positive examples: resilient forests, timber used in construction, increasing the accessibility of the forest stock for better management; negative examples: blocking the implementation of forest management plans through cumbersome and inconsistent environmental assessment procedures; publication in the Official Gazette of forest management plans in their entirety, which contain technical data irrelevant to the general public and which could be published as before recently on the website of the relevant ministry);
10. In order to avoid an infringement on forests, we propose to transfer the National Forest Inventory (NFI) to the Department for Sustainable Development of the Romanian Government. This will ensure the funding, the impartiality of the program, as well as the information necessary for the department to carry out analyses and reports in order to propose public policies in the field.

ASFOR representatives also brought up the fact that Romania is the only European country in which the forestry sector is managed through an IT system developed by a secret service, which leads to a series of problems related to the access of operators to their own information or to the management of information that is part of the private economic life of a sector, as well as to a lack of transparency in the development of IT applications.

They also insisted on the fact that the forest sector supports and encourages effective communication in order to promote policies tailored to the real needs of those involved in this economic activity and to avoid those situations where the adoption of legislation leads to bureaucratic bottlenecks without any added value. In this respect, they gave as an example the publication in the Official Gazette of forestry planning - approx. 500 pages/copy.

More details in ASFOR press release.