Global demand for high-end furniture and decorative veneers, manufactured in enormous Chinese production mills, has driven West African rosewood to become the world’s most trafficked illegal wildlife commodity — surpassing ivory, rhinoceros horn, and big-game cats combined in both value and volume.
That is according to a policy brief published by the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, which warns that exports of prized hardwoods totalled $2 billion between 2017 and 2022, with individual logs fetching $20,000 per metric tonne in 2021.
“Driven almost entirely by Chinese demand, rosewood is now the world’s most trafficked illegal wildlife product in terms of both value and volume, surpassing ivory and rhinoceros horn combined,” the brief states, drawing on evidence gathered across Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire.
In Ghana, an estimated 70 per cent of rosewood harvesting falls outside legal channels. Despite an outright export ban, the country shipped 540,000 metric tonnes to China between 2012 and 2019 — equivalent to six million trees and roughly 2,000 acres of forest. Across the border, Cameroon and Nigeria are no better, with illegal harvesting accounting for 65 per cent and 56 per cent of total production, respectively.
The financial haemorrhage is staggering.
The report reveals that Nigeria forfeits between $191 million and $383 million every year; Cameroon, up to $103 million; Côte d’Ivoire, up to $76 million; and in Gambia, as much as $9 million each year. Whilst the World Bank sets the global bill at between $7 billion and $12 billion in stripped government revenue annually.
It comes as Chinese investment across West Africa has surpassed $200 billion, financing roads, ports, and agribusiness ventures that push logging roads into previously undisturbed reserves — a pattern Wood Central documented in Central Africa, where a single Chinese operator was linked to more than $5 million in illicit timber from the Democratic Republic of Congo. A geospatial analysis cited in the brief found roughly 10 per cent of Ghana’s critical forest reserves and 11 per cent of Côte d’Ivoire’s overlap directly with Chinese-sponsored infrastructure corridors.
The money also funds wars.
In Senegal’s Casamance district, more than one million trees were exported to China by 2020, bankrolling the separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance. In Mali, for example, nearly 150,000 tonnes left the country despite a 2020 national ban, with al-Qaeda-linked militants controlling forest access. Chinese smugglers have sourced rosewood from Boko Haram-controlled zones in northern Nigeria, whilst in Mozambique, revenues have been linked directly to ISIS-affiliated al-Shabab.
“China’s demand for timber and illegal wildlife products contributes significantly to deforestation and biodiversity loss in West Africa,” the brief warns, with Chinese firms routinely operating shell companies and local agents to obscure accountability — laid bare in a 2017 case in which Nigerian officials accepted nearly $1 million in bribes to move 1.4 million illegal logs worth $300 million.
Wildlife trafficking is part of the same machinery. Since 2015, Nigeria has been China’s primary source for ivory and pangolin scales, with seizures between 2018 and 2023 totalling more than 30 metric tonnes of ivory and 167 metric tonnes of pangolin scales — at least 4,400 elephants and hundreds of thousands of pangolins.
And on the agribusiness side, Sudcam — a subsidiary of China Hainan Rubber Group — stripped more than 10,000 hectares in Cameroon between 2011 and 2018, contributing to 45,000 hectares of broader deforestation. It bypassed free, prior, and informed consent requirements the entire time — the same supply chain mechanics Wood Central tracked in examining how antique furniture demand feeds the rosewood racket.
The brief’s authors — from eleven nations — call for a binding regional code of conduct under ECOWAS, modelled on the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade framework. They also want Beijing to convert its voluntary Green Belt and Road environmental guidelines into enforceable obligations.
Without firm action, the brief warns, “the region’s forests — and the critical ecological and social benefits they provide — will remain at risk from unchecked Chinese firms’ exploitation.”
Whether that pressure lands is an open question. As Wood Central reported in tracking Africa’s broader push to close the illegal trade, enforcement gaps persist even where national bans are already on the books.
For further information: Atlantic Council Global China Hub / China Global South Initiative — Chinese Demand for Timber and Wildlife in West Africa: Responding to the Environmental and Social Impacts. atlanticcouncil.org
