and an insufficient number of forest guards.

The draft bill has angered forest owners and wood processors who fear it will create additional costs and legal roadblocks.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, suspect some local authorities are part of the "mafia" that controls the trade.

"The illegally cut wood is often accompanied by seemingly legal documents that are actually issued by dummy companies," Catalin Tobescu, president of Nostra Silva forest owners' association, told AFP.

"When the authorities eventually decide to check on these companies, it is too late, they no longer exist and their managers are gone."

' Irreversible impact'

In a robust sector with high demand, wood processing companies do not always check the origin of the raw material.

Romania's own market is estimated at four billion euros a year, dominated by the 400-year-old Austrian firm Schweighoferwhich moved into the country a decade ago.

Schweighofer's plans to open a fifth plant in Romania have annoyed conservationists and local woodworkers who say it will have an "irreversible impact" on forests here.

But Schweighofer spokeswoman Theresa Willmann disputes this.

The new site involved "a reorganization of the market", she said, and would create 650 jobs in the sawmill and an additional 2,000 indirectly.

"The total forest fund in Romania will not be affected by the logs Schweighofer needs," she told AFP in an email.

In a region that hosts Europe's largest old-growth forests outside Russia—and one that is home to 8,000 brown bears, 4,000 wolves and 3,000 lynx—Romania is not the only state threatened by deforestation.

In Bosnia, whose rich, 43 percent woodland is greater than the European average of 32 percent,