This chapter examines the role of public policy in deforestation in each of four West African countries: Liberia, Cote d'lvoire (hereafter, Ivory Coast), Ghana, and Gabon. We provide an overview of forest resources, deforestation, and international trade in tropical hardwoods for the entire region, and on a country-by-country basis. Patterns of property rights and foreign investment in each nation are addressed, as well as the national benefits these countries have derived from forest utilization and government capture of timber rents. We then focus upon reforestation and forest concessions policies, respectively, and examine the impact of forestbased industrialization policies. Finally, the impact of non-forestry policies on tropical forest utilization in each of the four nations is considered.

Overview

By most estimates, the rate of decline in the area of productive closed forest in West Africa has been the highest in the world since 1975, some 3.7 times the average rate for all tropical countries (Lanly and Clement 1979: 10–21). The four West African nations studied in this chapter include the Ivory Coast, with the highest rate of annual deforestation yet observed anywhere, Liberia and Ghana, in which only shreds of natural forest remain, and Gabon, where deforestation has been slow but will likely accelerate sharply before the end of the century, with the completion of the Trans-Gabon Railway.

In 1984, these four countries together accounted for nearly all of Africa's timber exports (Ivory Coast shipped 60 percent of this) but only 9.3 percent of world exports of tropical hardwood forest products (World Bank 1986: 8).