A Sector Transformed

Ghana is on the brink of a major advance in the fight against illegal logging, say Albert Katako and Obed Owusu-Addai. So why is the EU turning away from its flagship policy to tackle it?

Ghana will soon become the first African country - and the second nation in the world after Indonesia - to issue a prized FLEGT license for our timber exports. This means we will have met the stringent legal standards required for favourable access to the European Union and United Kingdom markets. 

A FLEGT license represents a gold standard in the fight against illegal logging; Ghana’s path to achieving it has been long, and often challenging. 

It’s almost 15 years since Ghana signed and ratified its Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with the EU. This paved the way for painstaking negotiations between our Government (Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Forestry Commission, Ghana Revenue Authority, Ministry of Trade and Attorney Generals Department); civil society, the timber industry to reform Ghana’s forestry sector and settle on a robust definition of legality which has been achieved through the consensus of all who have a stake in the country’s forests. 

The institutional changes our forestry sector has undergone since the VPA was initiated in 2009 have led to huge benefits, including for forest communities and Ghanaian civil society, while helping turn the tide of illegality and weak enforcement of laws that the sector was drowning in for decades. 

One measure of the impact of weak law enforcement is that in 2004 alone Ghana lost more revenue from illegal logging - $100 million (US) - than it received in development aid. This illegality went hand in hand with deforestation. An estimated quarter of Ghana’s forest cover was razed between 1990 and 2000. Poor governance, a lack of transparency and illegal logging were the forest sector’s defining features.  

And with the exploitation of our forests came misery for many of those already marginalised communities who lived in or by them: logging disrupted their lives, limited their access to the forest resources they depended on, and the wealth generated from harvesting timber rarely reached them. 

Vital amenities 

Overhauling our forestry sector has brought positive change: companies now negotiate Social Responsibility Agreements (SRAs) with communities who live within a five-kilometre radius of their logging concessions as required by the law (Legislative Instrument 2254).  

These agreements stipulate that timber companies must share the benefits (in cash or kind) of the forests they exploit with the people living there. As a result, poor, remote rural communities have been blessed with schools, bole-hole water , latrines and other vital amenities. In 2024, 127 SRAs have been negotiated with a total value of GHC 1,331,458 and GHC778,903 paid so far.  

Beyond these tangible and visible manifestations of our transformed forest sector, we also have rigorous systems in place ensuring the legality of our timber. 

For instance, our systems for tracing timber from the forest where it’s logged to where it’s sold domestically or exported, is a model others could follow, as it covers the entire market not a segregated part of it. The system covers all the timber and wood products in Ghana, ensures that only those that are legally and sustainably produced stay in the market, and has a transparent public portal that any person can interact with and see the timber flows within Ghana and how many benefits are flowing to communities. 

Going beyond legality Ghana’s laws ensure the sustainability of its timber. The measures introduced include that trees cannot be felled outside allotted areas and yields; logging can’t take place within Globally Significant Biodiversity Areas (GSBAs) and protected areas. Logging is also not permitted within certain radius of water bodies as well as certain gradient of hills and mountainous terrains. Additionally, only limited species within specific diameter class are permitted to be harvested with each hectare of forest. All these measures underpin the sustainability credentials of Ghana's reformed logging practices. 

The distance that Ghana has travelled in reforming its forestry sector and heralding a new era of transparency, could serve as both a model and an inspiration to other forested countries who are tackling the same deep-seated problems.  

The legality licences that will be issued will also be helpful for meeting the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which aims to tackle global deforestation by prohibiting companies from putting certain products on the EU market unless they are deforestation-free, degradation-free and legally produced. While deforestation-free can be identified largely through satellite imagery, legality is more complex, so these licenses will be a way for companies to provide the timber exported from Ghana is also legal. 

Worrying turn 

But just as Ghana is on the brink of a major achievement in our fight against deforestation, the EU, worryingly, appears to be moving away from VPAs.  

The EU informed the Governments of Cameroon and Liberia that it intends to unilaterally cancel the VPAs with these countries. Not only is the EU failing to live up to its role as a partner in these partnerships, it also undermines efforts, particularly in Liberia, to control illegal logging.  

Furthermore, with the EUDR now in place, the VPAs provide useful building blocks to support our country to meet EUDR requirements of legality and no deforestation, not just of timber but also of cocoa.  

The development of a national timber traceability system, the multistakeholder process and the independent monitoring are all part of that process. 

Meaningful partnerships such as the VPAs in Ghana are critical vehicles to address global deforestation and broader social and environmental sustainability issues. The President of the European Commission has said she wants to step them up: will she show she means it?

Image: Klaus Oskar Bromberg/Alamy

Categories: News, Forest Watch, Partner Voices, Ghana