Law of 1 March 1944 prohibiting the export of unmanufactured mahogany and other precious woods

The law of 1 March 1944, published in Le Moniteur No. 21 of 13 March 1944 under Élie Lescot, voted in the Chamber of Deputies on 28 February and in the Senate on 29 February 1944.

Article 1 prohibits the export of unmanufactured mahogany logs and boards and of all other precious woods. Article 2 repeals contrary provisions, with execution by the secretaries of state for agriculture and labour and for commerce and the national economy. The preamble grounds the ban in the threat that the export trade in Haitian precious woods would make scarce a material indispensable to national industry, and the text cites the arrêté of 10 January 1933 on wood cutting and the decree-law of 23 June 1937 on the protection of trees and mountain soil.

The form matters: the ban is on unmanufactured wood, so exporting finished goods remains open. That is a local-processing requirement, the same instrument Haiti later used in other sectors, and the corpus holds the mahogany-craft and forestry material against which the ban's effect can be read.