No roads, no trucks, no trace of a house. Deep in the Romanian Carpathians, some landscapes have only been sculpted by rain and have never – or almost – known the human hand. Incomparable reservoir of biodiversity, these primary forests are, for some, ten thousand years old. These spaces from another time are home to endangered species (bears, lynx, wolves and more recently bison, reintroduced in 2014).
But this fragile ecosystem has been threatened since the fall of communism in 1989, which opened the door wide to forestry business enterprises. No need to travel to Amazonia or Borneo to observe scenes of massive deforestation. Even within Europe, a gigantic commercial traffic is perpetuated against a background of corruption and threatens the country’s primary forests.
Ikea, the first private forest owner in Romania
On the winding roads of Transylvania, trucks carrying logs are legion. With one or two full trailers, they travel from the mountains to the sawmills. This daily parade is the visible part of a large market estimated at 6 billion euros per year which has cut through 349,000 hectares of forest areas between 2001 and 2019 in Romania according to satellite images from Global Forest Watch.
And this pace has accelerated: since 2014, each year, 38 million cubic meters of wood are cut in the country according to the national inventory. Worse, only half of this wood would be legally mined. The rest just … disappeared.
For Gabriel Paun, founder of the NGO against deforestation Agent Green, this overconsumption is due to Romanian national needs (3.5 million homes are heated with wood) and to the forestry industry, which also wants to sell wood. for the furniture sector. He holds the Romanian authorities responsible. “Governments have not been able to say stop. The timber companies came one after the other without regulation. Today, we find ourselves importing wood from Bulgaria for heating because our production disappears in the exports of furniture in kit form. “
Among these companies, often foreign, we find familiar names like Ikea which, through its subsidiary Ingka Investments, is now the largest private owner of forests in Romania (50,000 hectares estimated).
1.5% of strictly protected forests
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