Moldova’s environment ministry has told firewood buyers to demand a receipt for every cubic metre they take home, with the onset of cold weather driving a rise in illegal felling and in sales of timber moving without documents. It comes as Environment Minister Gheorghe Hajder confirmed on Saturday that inspectors will monitor harvesting and transport across the country, and will check the origin of timber already stacked in private yards.
“We have reached an absurd situation in which some forests are cut only so that these enterprises have money for their upkeep,” Hajder said in April, when he set out a restructuring of Moldsilva, the state agency that manages Moldova’s forest fund through 19 separate enterprises, more than half of which cannot cover their own wage bills.
Under the reform, all 19 will be merged into a single state enterprise, Pădurile Moldovei, with a single legal personality and a single national bank account, and will operate through five territorial directorates that will have no legal status of their own, with the ministry putting the administrative savings at about 70 million lei a year.
Timber will no longer be sold directly from the forest under the new model, with 30 depots to be built across the country where every cubic metre is weighed in, stored, and sold at a single national price, the ministry says, that will read the same in the north as in the south.
The reform also splits the jobs, assigning some staff to guard the forest and carry out silvicultural work while others handle sales from the supervised depots alone, a separation the ministry says will end uncontrolled sales at the stump.
An unannounced inspection Hajder ordered in January at the Ghidighici forestry district of the Chisinau Forestry Enterprise found 1,007 illegally cut trees, with the damage put above 567,000 lei and the timber itself valued at around 240,000 lei at market.
The timber from the 2025 forestry works was gone, with accounting records and physical stock diverging sharply, and inspectors finding a further 178 cubic metres that carried no accounting record at all.
The ministry alleges those involved burned tyres directly on the stumps so that the fire would destroy the evidence the trees had ever stood, and it drew inspectors from several regions for the job, a measure it said was taken to avoid local arrangements.
Moldova has 11.6 per cent forest cover, the lowest share of any country in Europe, on a forest fund whose management rules, approved in January, will guide about 344,000 cubic metres of annual harvesting from degraded, dry, or diseased stands through to 2030.
Romania is granting 1.7 million euros for Moldova’s first national forest inventory, which will be run by the National Institute for Forestry Research and Development “Marin Drăcea” alongside Moldova’s Institute for Forestry Research and Management and the Moldsilva Agency.
For buyers this winter, the ministry sets softwood at between 445 and 1,143 lei per cubic metre, depending on the forestry enterprise, and hardwood at between 950 and 1,630 lei, with timber bought without a document liable to confiscation and the vehicles used to move it liable to seizure.