As part of the implementation of the FLEGT-REDD CERTIFICATION projects set up by the ATIBT and financed by the European Union, the FFEM and the KfW, the Federation of Timber Industrialists, in abbreviation FIB, conducted a study on the state of play of the actors of the forest and wood sector in the DRC.

The FIB was supported by the Ecole Régionale Post-universitaire d’Aménagement et de gestion Intégrés des Forêts et territoires Tropicaux (ERAIFT) in its implementation. Begun in August 2019, the study lasted 4 months and was completed at the end of December 2019.

The main objective is to improve stakeholders’ knowledge of the private sector of the forest-based sector in the DRC. Specifically, the aim was to assess private actors (industrial and artisanal) according to the type of activity, areas of intervention, size, their involvement in the FLEGT VPA process and certification.

With this inventory, this study tries to present the legislative and regulatory framework in order to better understand the principles of management and exploitation of timber in the DRC, the geographical distribution of industrial timber exploitation titles, the typology of industrial actors in the timber sector according to the number of forest titles and their surface areas, the origin of capital, the state of progress in the management process, the evolution of timber production and export as well as the processing capacity for forest industrialists in the DRC.

It emerges that (i) all forest titles cover an area of 10,715,678 hectares out of a total of 155 million hectares in the country, i.e. 7%, and that (ii) the concentration of forest titles is in the 5 provinces of the country (Tshopo, Maï-Nombe, Equateur, Mongala and Tshuapa), i.e. 71%.

The typology of the industrialists of the sector has been made according to: number of titles, surface area, the state of progress in the management process and coupled with the reality on the production and transformation of wood. This typology determines the degree of each company, as developed in the attached study.

The study also gives the categorization of artisanal wood exploitation and presents the different actors involved in the link of the wood supply chain by sketching the local wood market in the East and West of the country. The study sketches the level of unionization of actors in the industrial and artisanal wood sector.

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