Ghana’s timber export industry recorded its weakest performance in six years in 2025, with volumes and revenues falling sharply across nearly every product category and every major market, according to the International Tropical Timber Organization’s Tropical Timber Market Report, a decline that reflects not a single shock but the accumulated weight of structural problems that policy has repeatedly failed to address.
Ghana exported 217,000 cubic metres of wood and wood products in 2025, a 20% decline from the 273,000 cubic metres shipped the previous year, according to data compiled by the Timber Industry Development Division.
Export revenues fell 21% year-on-year to €98.38 million, approximately $116.3 million, the weakest export performance in six years, both in volume and value.
The drop is all the more striking in context: Ghana’s timber industry reached a record 343,000 cubic metres exported in 2022, valued at €153.88 million, before entering a consecutive three-year decline.
Tariff Pressures Reshape Market Access
The United States, which accounts for close to 5% of Ghana’s wood products exports, primarily kiln-dried sawnwood, rotary veneer, and sliced timber, has become a materially more difficult market.
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The US tariffs on wood and wood products reshaped global timber trade flows, making market access difficult for major exporters and pushing up the cost of imported wood products across the American market.
Ghana, already a marginal supplier to the US compared with Canada, Mexico, and China, found its products further squeezed in a market where rising input costs and tariff-inflated prices were compressing builders’ margins and reducing overall import appetite.
The industry response globally has been to pivot toward value-added products less exposed to tariff headwinds, a pivot that Ghana’s timber sector, still dominated by air-dried sawn wood, is poorly positioned to make quickly.
A Low-Value Export Structure
Air-dried sawn wood was the leading export category, accounting for roughly 55% of volumes, followed by kiln-dried sawn wood at 14%, plywood at 11%, and logs at 10%.
This product mix tells its own story.
Ghana is exporting primarily in low-value, minimally processed form, the categories most exposed to price competition and least insulated from tariff disruption.
Meanwhile, the markets absorbing Ghana’s timber have been shifting in ways that carry their own risks.
Asia absorbed 63% of Ghana’s exports in 2025, followed by Europe at 17%, Africa at 13%, the Americas at 4%, and the Middle East at 3%.
A concentration of nearly two-thirds of export volume in Asian markets, primarily through teak, wawa, eucalyptus, and gmelina species, leaves Ghana exposed to demand fluctuations in markets where it has limited pricing power.
Regional Trade Offers a Limited Bright Spot
There is one qualified bright spot.
Despite the overall decline, exports to African markets showed signs of improvement.
After falling from 13% of Ghana’s export share in 2020 to 9% in 2024, the figure edged back up to 11% in 2025, driven mainly by ECOWAS markets where purchases rose 7% in volume to 19,771 cubic metres, led primarily by plywood, with Togo, Burkina Faso, and Gambia as the most active buyers.
President John Dramani Mahama, speaking at the Africa Trade Summit 2026, framed this kind of regional momentum as part of a broader strategy to reduce dependence on “external markets” and build “deeper regional value chains”, language that aligns with the AfCFTA agenda but has yet to translate into a specific sector-level programme for timber.
Industry Decline Runs Deeper Than Trade Conditions
The structural drivers of the decline are not new.
The Ghana Timber Millers Organisation reported that 96 timber companies have shut down over the past 15 years, reducing employment in the wood processing sector from approximately 95,000 to around 20,000, a contraction linked to declining availability of commercially valued wood species, underutilisation of plant capacity, and the rising cost of sourcing raw material over increasingly long distances.
The commercially viable natural forest is shrinking faster than it is being replenished, and plantation forestry has not scaled to fill the gap.
FLEGT Licensing Brings Access, But Not Supply
In this regard, Ghana is on the verge of a regulatory milestone that should, in theory, improve its competitive position: full implementation of its FLEGT licensing system under its Voluntary Partnership Agreement with the European Union, which certifies all Ghanaian timber exports as legally sourced and removes the need for further due diligence checks at EU borders.
Ghana became the first African country to win fast-lane access to EU markets for its timber when FLEGT licensing came into effect, with the first licensed batch entering the European market in October 2025.
Richard Nsenkyire, managing director of Samartex Timber and Plywood, described the licence as marking “the beginning of a new era in compliant international trade.”
The Core Problem Remains Unresolved
But the FLEGT licence addresses market access, not market supply.
The European market, which took 17% of Ghana’s timber exports in 2025, will now accept Ghanaian wood without additional legal checks.
The question is whether Ghana can produce enough legally sourced, sufficiently processed timber to make that access commercially meaningful, at a moment when illegal logging and mining are emptying concessions, licensed companies are scaling back, banks are threatening foreclosures, and the forest resource base continues to contract.
