CeCASt Brunch Seminar

Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Smugglers:  A Political Ecology of Chinese-run trafficking of Rosewood in Ghana

Speaker: Prof. George M. Bob-Milliar

Abstract
How do we explain the ineffectiveness of several bans on the export of rosewood from Ghana? Since 2012, Ghana has intermittently issued, banned, lifted, and reinstated bans, with 2019 being the latest outright ban on rosewood harvesting and exports. Yet, the illegal logging and Chinese-run trafficking of rosewood continued. This paper studies the underworld economy of the rosewood trade in Ghana. Based on data collected using an ethnographic approach from the rosewood hotspots, I argue that the trade in rosewood is non-transparent, and a criminal network along the value chain characterizes it. The strict ban on the exploitation and export of rosewood encountered several obstacles because smugglers, bureaucrats, and politicians benefit from the illegality. The African rosewood is classified as an endangered tree species. It is found throughout the Savannah and Forest-Savannah Transition Ecological Zones of Ghana. Before 2004, rosewood was primarily used to produce xylophones, charcoal, and firewood and as a dye in the northern regions. The informal nature of the rosewood trade saw politically connected individuals play a significant role in the trade. China is the primary market for African rosewood as a replacement for the Asian variety of rosewood, which has gone extinct. Many actors exploit rosewood: local chainsaw operators illegally cut rosewood trees for sawmills, which process the logs into sizable wood planks. The Chinese traders travel to the North with trucks of empty 20-footer containers to collect the wood, moving from village to village until the container is full. The study finds that a very sophisticated scheme involving the granting of salvage permits, order from above, misclassification and misdeclaration of timber species, deception, use of highway escorts, and forging official documents characterize the underworld economy of rosewood trade in Ghana.