Central Africa Moves to Ban Raw Log Exports by 2028

CENTRAL AFRICA · ECONOMY

A log export ban covering Central Africa is moving from promise to policy: the six CEMAC states and DR Congo intend to halt shipments of raw timber by 2028, betting that the world’s second-largest rainforest can sell finished wood instead of whole logs.

What the log export ban would change

Today, much of Central Africa’s timber leaves the region the way it has for a century: as raw logs, loaded whole onto ships, with the sawing, drying and finishing — and the jobs and margins — happening elsewhere. The planned ban would make that illegal across the CEMAC bloc and the DR Congo.

The policy’s logic is value addition. A cubic metre of furniture-grade sawn wood earns multiples of what the same volume fetches as an unprocessed log, and processing plants anchor employment that raw extraction never does.

The deadline now discussed is 2028 at the latest. Governments frame it as definitive, after years of slippage.

The commitment reaches beyond the CEMAC six to Kinshasa, whose forests dwarf everyone else’s. Ministers have spent the past two years trying to harmonise codes and timelines toward the same horizon.

A market moving in the ban’s favour

The economics are currently kind to the region’s foresters. Export prices for CEMAC forest products rose 2.9 percent between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, according to figures compiled in the French Treasury’s Central Africa brief and reported by Agence Ecofin.

Raw logs led the way, jumping 23.5 percent quarter on quarter to the end of March. Strong prices give exporters a cushion — and governments a window — to finance the shift toward processing.

Sawn wood and processed products moved far more modestly in the same data, which is the point: the premium sits in the processing, not the log. Capturing it requires mills the region has mostly yet to build.

The catch is that high log prices also raise the short-term cost of not exporting them. That tension explains why past deadlines kept slipping.

Gabon showed the region how

A regional ban was first slated for January 2023, then postponed as most members proved unready. Gabon, however, has prohibited raw-log exports since 2010 and used the policy to build the Nkok special economic zone, where dozens of mills and furniture makers now process okoumé and other hardwoods.

Gabon’s experience taught two lessons. Processing capacity must exist before the ban bites, and investors need power, ports and predictable rules to build the mills.

Replicating that across Cameroon, the two Congos and their neighbours is a far bigger task. Several members still lack the industrial base to absorb their own harvest.

Financing is the binding constraint. Mills need reliable electricity, trained workers and port logistics, and the region’s development banks are being pressed to fund all three.

Why the world should watch the Congo Basin

The Congo Basin’s forests are second only to the Amazon, and how they are monetised matters far beyond the region. Processed-wood industries, if they take root, would give the forests an economic constituency beyond logging concessions.

Conservationists watch with mixed feelings. Higher value per tree can ease pressure to over-harvest, but only if enforcement holds and concessions stay legal.

For buyers of tropical hardwood in Europe, Asia and the Gulf, the shift will surface in sourcing chains and certification paperwork. Traceability rules are already tightening in the same direction.

China, the dominant buyer of African raw logs, would feel the change first, and the ban would redraw one of the larger South-South commodity flows. Buyers would have to source sawn wood from African mills or look elsewhere.

The region’s carbon is already being packaged for sale, and its timber is next in line for the value-addition treatment. The test is whether Central Africa can industrialise a forest without consuming it.

For the region’s governments, the gamble echoes the one Africa is making in minerals: refuse to export raw, and force the value chain to come to you. Timber will show whether that strategy can hold a deadline.

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