Gabon is building a national data centre to track every log from the moment a tree is GPS-tagged in the forest through to the point of export — a move Libreville says will close data gaps that officials can no longer explain. That is according to Water and Forests Minister Maurice Ntossui Allogo, who today announced the initiative at a government briefing as part of efforts to modernise its timber industry.
Wood Central understands that the new system will digitise and centralise forestry data across government departments, linking the Water and Forests service directly with Customs and standardising records that currently operate in separate silos. Trees will be assigned GPS coordinates before felling, with harvested volumes and downstream movement — through processing plants and out to port — tracked at each stage.
The push follows a data discrepancy that the government said it struggled to account for. Ministry figures show 1.5 million cubic metres of logs generated more than 42 billion CFA francs (US$73.5 million) in 2024 — yet the following year, more than double that volume crossed the same system and produced a fraction of the revenue. Officials said the discrepancy could not be accounted for — and pointed to fundamental gaps in sector oversight.
Timber is Gabon’s second-most valuable export after oil and manganese, accounting for roughly 9 per cent of export revenue. Illegal logging and endemic corruption have long been documented within the sector, with the Environmental Investigation Agency completing a four-year investigation in 2019 that exposed how illegally harvested Gabonese timber was being deceptively marketed in the United States.
The data centre builds on Gabon’s October 2023 commitment to transition its entire forestry sector to the National Traceability System of Wood (SNTBG), developed jointly with EIA and civil society group Code4Nature. That system uses an Android mobile application, web platform and geoportal to create digital records from stump to port — though civil society monitors have warned that implementation gaps remain, and that independent oversight capacity is still limited compared to peer Congo Basin countries.
It comes as Wood Central reported that EU imports of Gabonese timber fell 18 per cent in 2024, part of a broader freefall in tropical timber trade driven by EUDR compliance uncertainty across Central Africa, which requires importers to conduct extensive due diligence on timber origin and legality before goods enter European markets. Trading partners have continued to report importing logs from Gabon despite a national ban on raw log exports in place since 2010.
