Central Africa is due to end raw-log exports from 1 January 2028, a ban already postponed twice, and the region approaches the deadline, shipping 20 per cent of the world’s tropical logs while cutting just 1 per cent of its sawnwood. That is according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), which will gather 60 ministers, development banks, and special economic zone operators in Yaoundé on 29 and 30 July to scope a regional study charged with building the mills the deadline assumes.
“There is a huge fiscal cost,” Daniel Ona Ondo, the then president of the CEMAC Commission, said as the bloc shelved its January 2023 start date, a ban first set for January 2022 and twice deferred while processing capacity lagged. The reset fixed 1 January 2028 as the commencement date, with member states told to begin phasing out shipments from January 2025.
Pointe-Noire stopped loading raw logs on 1 January 2023, when the Republic of the Congo went early and joined Gabon, whose own ban has been in place since 2010. Cameroon kept shipping and taxed instead, raising its raw-log export duty from 17.5 to 75 per cent since 2017 and banning 76 species ahead of the bloc-wide deadline.
“This tax hike has already dampened the activity of some local forestry operators,” the BEAC, the region’s central bank, warned in its assessment of Cameroon’s timber industry. Global log prices climbed 23.5 per cent in the March quarter, according to the bank’s own export index, sweetening the very trade the bloc is preparing to shut.
Numbers in ECA’s own meeting notice define the task: 20 per cent of world tropical log exports, 1 per cent of global sawnwood production, 6 per cent of tropical sawnwood, 7 per cent of tropical veneer, and 1 per cent of tropical plywood. Its concept note counts more than 200 million hectares of forest and more than 200,000 direct and indirect industrial timber jobs across a basin where less than 20 per cent of forest production carries certification.
“Special Economic Zones are the main tool,” Jean Luc Mastaki, the director of ECA’s Subregional Office for Central Africa, said of aligning the region’s industrial frameworks ahead of a Douala symposium in January 2025. Day two in Yaoundé is built around the zones already running, with dedicated sessions on Gabon’s Nkok and Cameroon’s Bertoua wood zone.
Wood Central understands that Nkok, which is 27 kilometres from Libreville, has since 2010 hosted 144 companies from 16 countries, 84 of which process wood. The showcase follows Gabon’s March move to track every log from stump to port through a new national data centre.
Europe’s buyers have not waited, with timber exports from Central Africa to the EU more than halved from $1.4 billion to $600 million on the Central Africa Forest Observatory’s count, while Douala and Kribi ship logs to China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, the markets holding the processing value the ban must repatriate. Restrictions without mills carry their own record, with research across 124 developing countries finding that log export bans are linked to a 22.3 per cent rise in deforestation as land competition shifts toward agriculture.
ECA’s study commits to a shared regional vision, an operational roadmap, and a pipeline of bankable investment projects that feed the subregion’s industrialisation master plan and CEEAC’s Vision 2050. On the bloc’s own numbers, the third deadline gives it 17 months to turn a 20 per cent share of the world’s tropical log exports into more than the 1 per cent of sawnwood it cuts.
