Flying under the radar?

Throughout the tropics, the wood sector provides hundreds of thousandsof people with jobs, including in artisanal operations that can go unnoticed in official statistics but which are crucial employers in rural areas. In this edition of the Tropical Forest Update, Paolo Cerutti and co-authors (page 3) report that artisanal chainsaw millers in Côte d’Ivoire—mostly young people seeking to become financially independent—produce at least one-quarter of the country’s domestic wood supply and probably much more; there is also substantial cross-border trade with neighbouring countries.