The Government has set up the Forest guards, a sort of Police for forests, to fight illegal logging. The Senate approved on October 20 the Government ordinance on the new structure.

The Forest guards are public institutions, subordinated to the central public authority responsible for the national forest area. They will need to monitor and enforce the forestry regime within the national forest area, reports local Capital.ro.

The Forest guards will have maximum 617 people, overall, and each guard unit needs to have at least 40 positions.

The total forest area in Romania amounts to 6.5 million ha, plus about 300,000 ha of forest vegetation on the plots located outside the national forest area.

Between 2008 and 2014, the volume of timber harvested from forests amounts to an average of 26.7 million cubic meters per year, according to the National Forest Inventory. However, the authorized volume during this period reaches only 17.9 million cubic meters per year, according to the National Statistics Institute (INS). One can presume that the difference of about 8.8 million cubic meters has been illegally exploited.

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