info.afrindex.com
China-Africa Trade Information Service
info.afrindex.com
China-Africa Trade Information Service
Image: The Conversation
The timber industry offers great development potential for Angola. According to the Centre for International Forestry Research, the domestic timber or community logging market in sub-Saharan Africa employ hundreds of thousands of people.
Angola is one of the world's fastest growing timber exporters from around 300 tonnes of wood in 2009 to 15,000 tonnes in 2015, which is reflected in the country's high RCA (WBG, 2017c).
Angola's tropical timber industry is concentrated on the extraction and exportation of logs (e.g. primary products), especially to China.
In 2018, 54, 891 cubic meters of natural forest log wood and 34,000 cubic meters of log wood were produced in forest plantations.
Figure 1 shows a preliminary SWOT analysis for the Angolan wood sector.
Angola provides an exceptional combination of large areas of underutilized land. Hence, expanding the forestry sector can create local employment and contribute to the creation of a diverse economy through moving the country from a primary product exporter to a country with a more complete value chain (e.g. locally producing plywood, paper and paperboard, and wood furniture).
Zambia tops the list of countries which exported its timber through Namibia. The other two countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
In total, 3 200 tonnes of Namibian timber were exported to China in 2018. This figure has doubled to 7 500 tonnes during January and February alone this year.
Namibian ports were further used to export 430 700 tonnes of timber from 2013 to 2019, including wood from other southern African countries. This is equal to 12 000 fully loaded trucks.
