Furniture: Why Importation Persist ?

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Furniture: Why Importation Persist ?

14 juil. 2022 11:20

Despite the huge potential for local production, Cameroon continues to spend billions of FCFA to import furniture.

Cameroon is one of the countries located in the Congo Basin tropical Rainforest that producers all sorts of timber. The country produces huge quantities of timber every year which is unfortunately exported in great quantity. According to the National Institute of Statistics, some 879 million cubic metres of both sawn and raw timber were exported between January and June 2021 with a value of 11 per cent to the economy during the period under review. From the forgoing therefore, it is crystal clear that local processing of wood into furniture still leaves much to be desired as most of the wood is exported either in raw logs or sawn. When it is transformed locally, the processing is done mostly in an artisanal manner, with poor quality finish products most often. This has left open the floodgates of importation of furniture from countries like Syria, India, South Africa, Senegal, Belgium, Turkey, China, Dubai, and Italy etc. The Ministry of Finance reported in 2021 that during the first quarter of 2020, Cameroon imported some 2,161 tons of furniture costing some FCFA 1.4 billion. The Federation of Associations of Wood Transformers in Cameroon dubbed FECAPROBOIS estimated that about FCFA 12 billion is used annually to import finished wood products.

furniture (household furniture, medical-surgical furniture) remains far below the demand. Local and regional markets for finished woodbased products are very narrow given that supply is grossly insufficient. According to a Tunisian Export report, Cameroon wood sector suffers from lack of knowledge and skills among local operators in the secondary and tertiary processing of wood. The report also indicates that difficulty to access adequate financing for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the sector. “All these facts result in recourse to external markets, the internal offer serving very little on the markets for the products of its second and third transformation, the report indicates” The technical and financial shortcomings of the local wood industry has given a greenlight to some 30 importers and distributors who have taken the advantage to meet national dema...