For decades, The Gambia has been a major source of African rosewood, which is prized by Chinese furniture makers for its significance as an indicator of wealth and nobility.
Despite a 2022 government ban on all timber exports, The Gambia remains an important source of the millions of metric tons of rosewood China imports every year. Smugglers move the timber illegally harvested in southern Senegal’s Casamance region, shipping it from the port in The Gambia’s capital, Banjul, with the help of corrupt port authorities and police.
“Things have got more difficult recently, but it’s not impossible if you have the right contacts,” one smuggler, identified as Lamin, told investigators from Al Jazeera. The researchers posed as potential investors in order to get an inside look at The Gambia’s rosewood smuggling networks.
China’s relentless hunger for rosewood has made it the most exploited wild product in the world. West Africa has been a major supplier of African rosewood, known scientifically as Pterocarpus erinaceus. Between 2017 and 2022, West African nations shipped more than 3 million metric tons of rosewood worth at least $2 billion to China, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
The Gambia’s former leader Yahya Jammeh’s Westwood Gambia was the only Gambian company authorized to export rosewood to China between 2014 and 2017, compounding the corruption inherent in the rosewood trade. An EIA investigation found that, between 2012 and 2020, The Gambia shipped more than 1.6 million rosewood trees to China — despite the fact that rosewood trees were virtually extinct in the country by 2011. The trees came from Casamance, where smugglers pay rebels a “tax” that funds their long-running rebellion against the Senegalese government.
The risk of being implicated in trafficking rosewood prompted French shipping company CMA CGM to stop accepting timber shipments from The Gambia in 2020. Smugglers rely on other companies that are less scrupulous to move logs to China. During Al Jazeera’s investigation, traffickers told researchers that 200 containers filled with rosewood logs were waiting at Banjul’s port for their trip to China. While corrupt authorities in The Gambia mislabel containers of rosewood logs to defeat the export ban, when they reach China the valuable commodity is revealed.
Al Jazeera’s investigation found that China’s rosewood imports from The Gambia grew by 43% between September 2022 and 2023. Imports were up 58% from pre-pandemic levels for the same month.
“The traffic still happens towards The Gambia, but there’s less rosewood now than before,” Haidar el Ali, Senegal’s former environment minister, told Al Jazeera. Ali is among Africa’s most famous conservationists. He lives in Casamance and is fighting to preserve the region’s shrinking population of rosewood trees.
Observers say The Gambia is trying to put a stop to rosewood trafficking through measures such as the 2018 National Forest Action Plan. The plan imposes strict rules for logging permits, and tracks the source of logs and the harvesting techniques used to acquire them. However, the plan has struggled against financial limitations and the ability to monitor illegal activity.
Gambian President Adama Barrow and then-Senegalese President Macky Sall agreed in 2018 to step up patrols along their porous borders with an eye toward reducing rosewood trafficking. It’s unclear how successful that has been.
Writing for the Institute for Security Studies, Feyi Ogunade, coordinator for ENACT’s West Africa Organized Crime Observatory, said The Gambia and Senegal should expand ecotourism and sustainable agriculture to help citizens make a living while preserving rosewood.
“The Gambia’s biodiversity offers potential for nature-based tourism, engaging local communities as eco-guides, lodge operators or artisans,” Ogunade wrote recently. “This approach not only supports livelihoods but generates revenue for reinvesting in conservation, fostering both environmental protection and economic growth.”
