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, composed of Mrs. Mihaela Frăsineanu and Mr. Daniel Botănoiu, State Counsellors in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Romania. During this discussion, ASFOR presented a list of 10 measures stemming from the "Green Romania in 10 steps" programme:

1. Registration of machinery used in timber harvesting (forestry machines/tractors, foragers, skidders, ropeways, forest ironhorse) by requiring their registration only at the town hall, without the obligation of CIV and ITP respectively, regardless of tonnage, with exemption from the application of the relevant provisions for the year 2024, at the same time as the corresponding amendment of the draft law under debate in the Romanian Senate (ORDINANCE No 3 of 18 January 2024);
2. Create the conditions for the recovery of road tolls and excise duties for non-road fuel (diesel and petrol) used in specific forestry operations (budgetary effort estimated at €21 million);
3. As the weight of timber varies greatly and there is no possibility of weighing at the place of loading - in the forest - ASFOR proposes to allow a weighing tolerance of 10% for the transport of timber and timber products on public roads;
4. Financing through the environmental fund available to AFM for the purchase of specialised forestry machinery for clearing and thinning (the most important work to ensure the continuity of the forest);
5. Introducing the obligation for public buildings to use at least 20% of wood materials;
6. Separation of timber management and logging activities in state-owned forests, and logging, sorting and transport activities in state-owned forests to be carried out mainly with private economic operators, and where possible organised on a basin basis by contracting these services for 2-4 years. Timber harvesting is an economic activity, and historically the state has proven to be much slower to adapt to the needs of the competitive market. Harvest all the timber per foot in a single auction at the beginning of the year, and publish a schedule of months and volumes for the sawn timber;
7. Harvesting of cut timber (working/firewood) from state-owned public property should be done only from video-monitored storage (the switch to cut timber has created a real stock management problem on primary platforms and has led to the alteration of valuable timber), and where this is not possible, harvesting should be done by the foot and the timber should be measured as it leaves the forest floor;
8. Elimination of the penalty of being banned from participating in the tendering procedure for 6 months for economic operators who have terminated contracts, but with the introduction of a penalty consisting of a gradual increase in the percentage of the guarantee retained, 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 retention of the tender guarantee;
9. Creation of a working group to develop a Bioeconomy Law, applying the principles of the circular economy, in order to transform environmental obligations, restrictive, coercive and often with no environmental result, into working tools that allow the sustainable exploitation of wood resources and the fight against the effects of climate change (positive examples: resilient forests, timber used in construction, increasing the accessibility of forestry land for better management; negative examples: blocking the implementation of forestry plans through cumbersome and uneven environmental assessment procedures; publication in the Official Gazette of forestry plans in their entirety, which contain technical data that are irrelevant to the general public and which could be published as they were until recently on the ministry's website);
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 funding, impartiality of the programme, and the information needed for the department to carry out analyses and reports in order to propose public policies in this area.

ASFOR representatives also raised 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 number 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 that the forestry sector supports and encourages effective communication in order to promote policies adapted to the real needs of those involved in this economic activity and to avoid situations where the adoption of legislation leads to bureaucratic bottlenecks without any added value. In this respect, they gave the example of the publication of forestry plans in the Official Gazette - approx. 500 pages/copy.

More details can be found in ASFOR press release.