Ghana
Ghana's timber industry has, to a large extent, evolved separately to that elsewhere in (primarily francophone) tropical Africa. Its exports comprise a rather higher (albeit low) degree of semi-finished products - notably furniture - than the norm for tropical Africa.

Post-Independence governments (directly or indirectly) managed the nation's forest resources in ways that have led to severe degradation of those forests and the fragmentation of the timber industry.

Efforts are being made to reduce commercial timber production to a sustainable level but output is more than three times as high as officialy sanctioned.

Subsistence farming and cash-cropping compound forest destruction by commercial logging in West Africa rather more than they do in the Congo Basin.

Speculative activities were particularly acute during the mid-1990s, when East Asia became, for a short while, the principal export destination. The Northern EU and the USA are prominent as export destinations.

India appears to dominate the market for West Africa's (largely immature) plantation teak. As much as one third of those teak exports are suspectd of being illegal.

Despite not being in the CFA franc zone (and having banned the export of logs of high value species), Ghana experienced a temporary surge in exports in 1994 - primarily of logs destined for East Asia. Ghana subsequently prohibited all logs exports. However, it now seems likely that that log export ban will be lifted.