Illegal Timber Trade With China Is Fueling Terrorism in Mozambique

Timber smuggling from Mozambique’s ancient forests to China is helping to drive an Islamist insurgency and organized crime in the southern African country, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
Terrorists affiliated with the ISIS terrorist group’s global network have been waging a brutal campaign in northern Mozambique for the past decade, killing thousands of people and displacing about 1 million.
The group claims to be fighting for the rights of the impoverished locals against President Felipe Nyusi’s government, which it accuses of failing to develop the province despite its vast resources.
Cabo Delgado’s sources of wealth include oil, natural gas, rubies, and sapphires.
French energy firm, Total, has built a $20 billion gas liquification plant on Cabo Delgado’s coast.
Fabergé jewelry brand owner, Gemfields Group, owns 75 percent of the Montepuez ruby mine in the province. In 2023, its revenue was $167 million.
Since 2017, Ansar terrorists have targeted towns and villages, carrying out massacres, beheadings, rapes and kidnappings. Houses and settlements have been destroyed by rockets and arson.
EIA Africa program manager Raphael Edou told The Epoch Times Cabo Delgado is the “perfect place” for organized crime to flourish.
“You’ve got minimal law enforcement, intense poverty, well-established trafficking routes, corrupt state actors, and now terrorists,” he said.
Troops from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, plus Rwanda, are currently locked in battle with Ansar terrorists.
The EIA investigation is supported by a recent Mozambique government report that says the terrorists have taken advantage of the illicit timber trade to “fuel and finance the reproduction of violence.”
The report says the terrorists are smuggling an assortment of “forest and wildlife resources,” including wood, mostly to China, which is contributing to a “very high level of fundraising” for Ansar.
Filimão Suaze, spokesperson for the Mozambique government, told The Epoch Times the terrorist group is earning at least $2 million a month from illicit rosewood exports to China.
The EIA said rosewood is a general term for several species of tropical hardwood trees that produce deep red lumber. In China, the wood is called “hongmu” and is used to make expensive reproductions of Ming Dynasty furniture.
Mozambique, it says, is China’s primary supplier of rosewood.
Mozambique shipped 20,000 metric tons of the internationally protected timber to China in 2023 alone, despite a long-standing ban on exporting logs, said the EIA.
In doing so, the southern African country surpassed Madagascar, Nigeria, and Senegal as China’s major rosewood source.
“Chinese logging companies have decimated rosewood forests across Africa, and Mozambique is next on the list,” Gabriel Klaasen, a South African environmental activist, told The Epoch Times.
“The EIA investigation lays bare how China is colluding with corrupt officials in Mozambique to commit environmental crimes for immense profit, also by taking advantage of the insurrection in Cabo Delgado.”
Suaze, spokesperson for Mozambique, denied that government officials are involved in illegal rosewood harvesting and smuggling.
The EIA reports say at least 30 percent of Mozambique’s rosewood grows in forests controlled by terrorists.
Another environmental organization, Global Forest Watch, calculated that illicit hardwood logging has contributed to the loss of more than 4 million hectares of forest cover in Mozambique over the past 20 years.
It said the country loses the equivalent of 1,000 football pitches of forest cover every day.
“A log export ban has been in place in Mozambique since 2017, yet China continues to import huge volumes of logs to the extent that China is now the importer of more than 90 percent of Mozambique’s endangered wood,” said Edou, the EIA Africa program manager.
EIA investigators traced about 300 containers of a type of rosewood known as pau preto from the port of Beira to China between October 2023 and March 2024.
Collectively, according to their report, the shipments amounted to 10,000 metric tons of rosewood worth more than $18 million.
Klaasen said much of the revenue is “going directly into the pockets of terrorists who have committed terrible atrocities.”
“The terrorists are allowing organized crime groups access to forests so that trees can be cut down and the wood shipped to China,” he said.
“In return, the terrorists get a slice of the pie. Everyone’s happy, except the people of Cabo Delgado who continue to be subjected to terror every day.”
China banned the harvesting of its native rosewood in 1998 after uncontrolled logging devastated local supplies.
That’s when Chinese logging companies turned to Africa, where laws are often not enforced and where officials are corruptible.
“The Chinese started in The Gambia, in 2001, it took less than a decade for that country’s indigenous rosewood to be declared extinct,“ said Klaasen. ”The Chinese then turned attention to countries like Senegal and others, where the destruction continued.”
The EIA said Chinese traders circumvent export bans using various tactics, including by mixing the rosewood bought in Cabo Delgado with legal logs in shipping containers. They also mislabel the contents of containers to hide rosewood shipments.
Its report refers to the dealings of Chinese national Yu Guofa, who it said is a businessman with mining and forestry concessions in Mozambique.
Yu acknowledged to investigators that at least half of the timber he trades in is “unprocessed,” a practice that violates Mozambique’s log export ban.
He confirmed that he has traded unprocessed logs from Cabo Delgado to China and Vietnam “for many years,” and has helped other Chinese timber trading companies do the same.
Yu told the EIA he has close relationships with Nyusi and some military commanders in Cabo Delgado.
Suaze said the president of Mozambique denies knowing “anyone by the name of Yu Guofa.”
Jasmine Opperman, a security analyst and former South African counterintelligence officer, told The Epoch Times that the EIA revelations “make a lot of sense.”
“It has become obvious that these terrorists have external avenues of funding because the insurgency keeps flaring up despite the presence of SADC troops,” she said.
“Recent attacks show the terror campaign is spreading to areas even outside Cabo Delgado. My information is that Ansar al-Sunna is recruiting fresh fighters across Mozambique and even in neighboring countries, like Tanzania.
“It would be impossible for it to do so, and to have access to more weapons and ammunition unless it had a regular channel of money.”