Agent Green report: Ten methods of theft and ten reasons to update SUMAL

Bucharest, 1 November 2022 – Agent Green today publishes its report on methods of massive timber theft by cheating SUMAL, from the time it became operational 21 months ago to the present, with the environment ministry’s ongoing assistance.

SUMAL was compromised from its launch to keep illegal and undetected logging at the highest possible volume, although NGOs proposed solutions that could have countered the methods of theft exposed today in Agent Green’s report.

The methods of theft are not even very sophisticated. Hauliers and processors can very easily cheat SUMAL using at least ten methods of theft such as teleportation, time travel, evaporation or sublimation. In all cases, the stolen timber never appears in SUMAL, and this volume of timber exceeds that of legal logging,” said Gabriel Păun, president of Agent Green.

Report in Romanian:

Agent Green report: Ten methods of theft and ten reasons to update SUMAL

Report in English:

Agent Green Report: 10 methods to cheat SUMAL

Perhaps the most serious method is evaporated shipments, meaning shipments invisible in SUMAL, which make it impossible for police officers, gendarmes and Forest Guard inspectors to enforce the law. This method is facilitated by SUMAL’s defective and deliberate programming in the frequent cases where hauliers travel loaded with timber and remain unchecked along the entire route with mobile data switched off. After delivery, hauliers delete the application from their mobile device so that the data entered offline are never sent to the SUMAL server. They reinstall the application for every shipment an unlimited number of times to enter data offline that they would upload online only if stopped for an inspection en route.

Dan-Cătălin Turiga, forestry engineer and Agent Green investigator:

“Any method can be countered if there is a will. Even the evaporation method, through a series of measures including:

• Supplementing the rules approved by Government Decision 497/2020 with a ban on issuing a new accompanying permit for vehicles with previous journeys not completed in accordance with legal provisions.
• Reprogramming SUMAL so that information about an offline shipment persists on the device even after the application is uninstalled and reinstalled. This information would be transferred to SUMAL’s servers as soon as the user installed the application again and went online.
• Detection and blocking of operators should be performed automatically by the Sumal 2.0 Avize application, whose functions must be developed for this purpose.
• Including a substantial administrative penalty in Law 171/2010, coupled with confiscation of the monetary value of quantities thus disappearing from the timber traceability chain and withdrawal of professional haulier status, would have been a deterrent. Law 171/2010 should also reintroduce physical confiscation when such a shipment is detected in traffic and empower the Gendarmerie to enforce the law.
• It is a matter of honour for the Government to dismiss an environment minister who knows about the major deliberate systemic shortcomings made operational 21 months ago under that same minister’s mandate.
• It is also necessary to require a single permit for every journey/vehicle, listing all recipients and their respective unloading addresses, regardless of their number. For these situations, the Sumal application must provide photographs of the load’s condition after each delivery to a recipient.”

Other methods concern timber from a different source and date than those declared and involve an average of five hundred shipments a week. Overloading is also very common, yet the authorities rarely confiscate lorries as required by law. Multiple shipments continue to use a single set of documents because transport permits remain valid for an unjustifiably long time and inspections are neither strict nor frequent enough. Much theft takes place under the very eyes of active citizens, who can often see photographs in Inspectorul Pădurii of shipments whose loads are wholly or partly out of view. SUMAL should never have approved such shipments with incomplete photographs.

Timber thieves’ creativity can outwit even the most vigilant authorities. The virtual-operations method creates temporary and permanent depots, primary landings and timber dispatches in the system on a purely fictitious basis. The aim is to keep virtual reserves permanently available. Such actions are very difficult to detect under present conditions. Fictitious transport is a simple game whose hardest part is taking the mobile phone by car, for example, between the place of issue and the destination to plot
the route on the map.

In conclusion, gaps in SUMAL 2.0’s programming and weak enforcement of existing laws leave current tools for combating illegal logging insufficiently agile in rigorously tracking timber origin and traceability. Consequently, timber theft continues at an alarmingly high level. The mechanism that systematically devastates national forest ecosystems and causes irreparable harm to the environment, society and the economy is being perpetuated and intensified.

Developing Sumal 2.0 with the functions specified for each method and adopting the legislative changes proposed in Agent Green’s report will undoubtedly lead to a real reduction in these negative phenomena. This action needs to be preceded by replacing the environment minister and thorough inspections by the prime minister’s Control Body.

Press contacts:

Dan-Cătălin Turiga, Agent Green investigator, forestry engineer
dan-catalin.turiga@agentgreen.org
0728273782

office@agentgreen.org