Mozambique will introduce a new digital timber export control system to eliminate data discrepancies and crack down on log smuggling, the country’s director of forestry and wildlife confirmed, days after prosecutors opened a criminal case into the illegal clearance of 400 containers at the country’s most scrutinised port.
On Monday, Imede Falume, Mozambique’s director of forestry and wildlife, addressed the inaugural meeting of the National Directorate of Forestry and Wildlife.“We started with digitisation for forest licensing, and we will now move into digitisation of the export process,” Falume said. “This will ensure high reliability because information provided recently was inconsistent.”
He did not provide a launch date, but confirmed digital tools should resolve smuggling concentrated in central and northern Mozambique, where minimal port-level traceability has allowed the trade to persist across successive administrations. “Once we implement the digital export control system, we believe it will significantly resolve this,” he added.
On 17 March, Mozambique’s Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed it had opened a criminal case into the suspected illegal export of approximately 400 containers of logs from Pemba port in Cabo Delgado province. A formal complaint reviewed by the Centre for Investigative Journalism Malawi alleges 406 containers departed the province without valid customs declarations, full tax payments, or proper exit authorisations — with only 44 of 450 containers clearing on documentation that met legal standards.
That complaint names Falume, alleging that during his first tenure from 2020 to 2022, more than 76 containers of timber vanished from government custody at Pemba. Savana newspaper reported in July 2025 that a family-owned logistics company in which Falume’s children reportedly hold a 70 per cent stake transported timber along known smuggling routes through Cabo Delgado; Falume has not publicly responded to the allegations and was reappointed to his directorship in May 2025.
Pemba’s record is long and documented — as Wood Central reported in tracking the Environmental Investigation Agency’s expanded Global Environmental Crime Tracker, approximately 65 per cent of timber exported from the port violates Mozambique’s log export ban, in place since 2017, whilst over 89 per cent of the 3.7 million tonnes shipped from Mozambique to China between 2017 and 2023 also likely violated that prohibition. As it stands, 90 per cent of Mozambique’s timber exports are destined for China, with demand concentrated in the manufacturing of veneer and plywood.
Mozambique’s own National Terrorist Financing Risk Assessment estimates timber smuggling in Cabo Delgado generates approximately US$2 million per month for Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jamaah insurgents — the same province from which hundreds of allegedly undocumented containers have been exported — in a pattern the EIA has identified as part of a broader African timber trafficking economy, as Wood Central reported when Chinese demand for African hardwoods was linked directly to insurgent financing across the continent.
According to the Forest Stewardship Council, Mozambique loses US$500 million annually to unsustainable forestry practices, including illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. In November 2025, parliament unanimously passed a bill banning all log exports outright, closing loopholes in a 2010 surcharge law. The digital licensing platform for forest management was launched in mid-2025; the export control system has yet to receive a confirmed rollout date.
