 In Cameroon, the domestic timber industry is hugely important to the economy and creates thousands of jobs. But due to a lack of government regulation, the entire industry is effectively criminalised and approximately half of the country's timber is sold on the black market. This is bad news for the forests, for the government and for the thousands of Cameroonians who are directly and indirectly reliant on the trade. The biggest challenge today is to be able to sell legal timber. So this is the problem of the government. It is the government that knows why they refuse to sell the legal timber. Only when they act, it is as if there is a blockage, that certain individuals refuse to reach this level to benefit the state or that the state recovers something on this occasion. Research conducted by C4 has found that the informal timber sector accounts for more than 30 million euros a year to local economies, almost three times as much as formal taxes redistributed from the formal timber sector. Yet this industry is largely operating outside of the legal framework and is not accounted for. Because the domestic timber trade falls outside of the law, harvesting, transporting, processing and selling are unregulated and the government is missing an opportunity to obtain formal revenues from the timber. The greatest regret is that all the money we pay go into the pocket of individuals. Individuals are feeding fat behind the government. The government is remaining poor at every dungeon, at the forest administration, which is the forest guard or the gendarmerie on the way, they impose on us to give money. When you are doing in any business, everybody who is present in front of you and ask for anything you are forced to do because you have no other option. For instance, in a forestry checkpoint on the way, when they were telling me that my way B is not authentic, what should I do? I must do something to control my journey because I have no backing to take the person to the forestry line and say no, this is what the law says. To fight back against corruption, Cameron's timber traders in 2012 formed an association called ANCOVA to ensure they are included in the formal timber industry. It's very important that at least you start to record what's getting out of your forest. And so if you don't start at least to record some of this production, it's very difficult for the government to come up with long-term strategies. It's a herculean task because there are thousands and thousands of people. So it's not easy for a government that is famous for under-resourced, under-staffed, etc. I feel that there is more willingness today to tackle this issue than there was in the past. Under a voluntary partnership agreement signed with the European Union, the Cameroonian government is now attempting to legalise the entire timber production chain. While no legal framework has yet been finalised, both informal loggers and the government are in talks with each other to promote more openness and transparency.