Illegal wood, which refers to any product of cuts made without authorisation, or by illegal means such as child labour or non-compliance with environmental protection rules, is a real scourge in Cameroon.
The Minister of Forests and Wildlife, Jules Doret Ndongo, in a letter dated June 13, 2023, required of his employees of decentralized services to “nullify control activities and seize all unduly harvested forest products in circulation on the national territory”.
The measure to intensify the fight against illegal wood in circulation in Cameroon stems, says the Minister, from information that “significant quantities of illegally exploited forest products circulate in peace and are dumped on the internal wood market”.
In a document published in September 2020, the FAO reveals, for example, that “the proportion of sawn timber from legal sources and supplying the domestic market is estimated at only 27% of the total volume of lumber in circulation in the markets of the country’s main cities. The remaining 73% therefore represents the share of illegal wood supplied in the domestic market and its operators”. This figure is confirmed by the International Forest Research Centre (CIFOR).
According to this international organization, which launched in 2020 a new project called “Susor for sawing transactions of legal origin in Cameroon”, in collaboration with the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife, three-quarters of the sawns purchased in the urban markets of Yaoundé, Douala and Bertoua are of informal origin.
In order to circulate these illegal products in the country, foresters, we officially learnt, do not often hesitate to use counterfeit documents.
“I was able to see that some crooked economic operators use counterfeit secure documents, to bleach illegally exploited wood, knowing that some of your employees initial and sign the blank car letters, and often without referring to the transmission forms accompanying the said documents,” reads a correspondence from Minister Jules Doret Ndongo, sent to the regional delegates of his ministerial jurisdiction in 2021.
