Sale of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) can be of great importance to rural livelihoods and some NTFPs are now in very high demand. This paper presented a study of the sale of four major NTFPs at markets in southern Cameroon. Turnover was significant - at least US$1.75 million in the first half of 1995. The more than a thousand traders, who were almost all women, made weekly profit margins of up to 48 %. However, far from being wealthy exploitative elites, most earned less than the minimum wage from their sales and had recently been adversely affected by a new tax on the informal sector. The authors noted that since NTFPs were important to traders as well as gatherers, future research and policy on NTFPs should take both groups into account.