Chinese-driven Ghana rosewood trade: Actors and access dynamics

The growing demand for rosewood in China has led to systemic and rapid illegal exploitation in many forest-rich countries in tropical regions, especially in Africa. It is speculated that there is a 26-billion-dollar rosewood industry in China. West African countries contribute about 80% of rosewood to global trade. Ghana has been ranked second in Africa and fourth in the world among top suppliers of rosewood logs to China by volume. Drawing theoretical insights from access theory and based on original empirical research conducted in Ghana from April to August 2022, we analyze how a constellation of actors along the rosewood trade chain had access to that natural resource. In the same vein, we scrutinize the complexity of the related formal and informal network arrangements both between key actors and within state bureaucracies in Ghana. Our research broadly responds to the question of how Chinese investors got access to rosewood in Ghana and examines the different institutional arrangements which encouraged the Chinese-driven trade of rosewood in Ghana. Our findings reveal that there was no formalized agreement between Ghana and China’s rosewood trade as the related domestic market was sporadic and informally initiated in 2009 by a Chinese entrepreneur. The study reveals that different non-state and state institutions (including sectoral state bureaucracies and individuals) benefited from the rosewood trade without recourse to a formal governance structure. The study reveals an embedded informal system of national and community-level arrangements, which enabled access to rosewood and its attendant benefits. This research makes an empirical-based contribution to what drives access to and who benefits from the globalization of natural resources in African countries characterized by ‘political disorder’. From a China-Africa relations perspective, this work contributes to the politics of natural resources and the related sustainability challenges in the context of increasing global Chinese influence in Africa.