Romanian wood industry organize nationwide protests
Representatives of the Wood Industry Association (AIL) - Prolemn started protest actions in several cities across the country on Thursday February 8, based on dissatisfaction with the authorities' failure to adopt a plan of measures to help overcome the crisis in the industry.
The association called on the Romanian Government and the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests to take strong measures, such as promoting an Emergency Ordinance to remove bottlenecks related to the environmental assessment of forestry plans and fair timber prices.
According to a press release industry demands that legal timber should be at fair market prices; bottlenecks linked to the environmental assessment of forestry planning need be removed; valuable wood should go to industry, not to firewood (promote a new regulation for the valorisation of wood); wood on the market, legally harvested, for industry and the population should not rot in the forest; the wood industry should be buyer of wood already on the market (the forest should be guarded at the stake).
According to the NSI (National Statistics Institute) , the drop in production in 2023 was 24% in the wood industry and 13% in the furniture industry, and this trend will continue in 2024 if in the absence of an adequate plan of measures. The industry is a competitive one, with a direct and induced contribution of 3.5% to Romania's GDP, with a positive annual net contribution of €3.5 billion to the country's trade balance, supporting 150,000 jobs in Romania, mostly in rural communities. Artificially reducing the volume of timber harvested in Romania keeps timber prices high, affecting the competitiveness of the Romanian timber industry.