The president of Mozambique’s tax authority says that the country loses around 12.9 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year due to illegal exports of mineral, forestry and wildlife resources, most of which to Asian countries.
Data from the International Monetary Fund, of April 2020, estimated Mozambique’s GDP at US$14.9 billion.
Amelia Muendane said that this practice affected the collection of tax revenues for the state, stressing that the central and northern regions of Mozambique were those where the country lost most resources.
She points out that smuggling mainly involves gold, timber and forest and wildlife resources, “which are illegally exported to different continents”.
She said that a study carried out by the Mozambican tax authority indicated that at least 12.9 percent of GDP “is the loss that Mozambique registers, annually, due to illegal exports of these products.
Officials involved
Meanwhile, the leader of the Party for Peace, Development and Democracy (PDD), Raúl Domingos, says the loss is very worrying, and it will be difficult to resolve this issue because, in his opinion, smugglers, most of them Chinese, have the protection of certain state officials.
“We know that for some time there have been accusations that certain state officials are involved in the squandering of forest resources, and I believe that it is they who protect the smugglers,” he said.
The analyst Sande Carmona, for whom the smugglers “have some sponsorship at the central government level, knowing that forest and wildlife products are of great importance in the international market”, holds the same opinion.
At the level of the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC), the illegal export of forest and wildlife resources is facilitated by several factors, namely, porosity at the borders, corruption, lack of rigour in inspection and weak enforcement.
