Cocoa, coffee production in Cmr battle with ailing issues

Cocoa and coffee sectors in Cameroon account for about 28% of non-oil exports and nearly 40% of exports from the primary sector, including agricultural products.

Most of the production is the work of small producers in seven areas of production. It is estimated that cocoa and coffee (arabica and robusta) are produced by nearly 600 000 producers and that activities in these sectors are beneficial directly or indirectly to about 6 million people.

By every crop year, about 400 billion F are distributed to different links in the chain. Until 1991, cocoa and coffee sectors in Cameroon saw a systematic control from the State, especially through the National Office of marketing of commodities. The marketing was framed, periodic markets organized; the quality of cocoa controlled and prices were differentiated depending on grades.

Blank credits were granted to operators with their respective banks by BEAC in proportion to their quotas to pre-finance the campaign. After 1991, the State decided to liberalize these two sectors by disengaging the productive sector to focus on its regulatory functions.

The objective was the professionalisation of the operators, good post-harvest practices and trade ownership by producers, the increase in the offer of better quality cocoa, promotion of the Cameroon label, etc.

20 years after the liberalisation of the cocoa and coffee sectors, marketing of these products continues to suffer from several ills, is a diagnosis of the Interprofessional Council of cocoa and coffee (CICC).

These difficulties are, among others, the atomization of the placing on the market of the products, the proliferation of non-professional intermediaries, the weak structuring of professional agricultural Organisations (OPA), the unavailability of local statistics both for the production and marketing, very little increase in significant production, a total absence of traceability and the average quality of products marketed.

Faced with this state of affairs and the growing recriminations from the international market on the lack of traceability of the Cameroonian marketing system , several systems have been tried without success, including the establishment of the CICC of district committees, and then implementing local marketing committees placed at the level of each district.

A survey conducted in 2012 by the permanent secretariat of the CICC at the locations where these local committees of marketing showed that they do not work. With this observation, the CICC started, during the 2013-2014 campaign that has just ended, the Programme of support for the Organization of the marketing of cocoa (AOC program).

For this pilot phase, the Department of the Lékié (it ranks third of large basins of production, after the departments of the Southwestern region and Mbam-et-Kim), was chosen as a field of experimentation.

The specific objective of this program was to organise the placing on the market of cocoa by creating large groupings, not only to enable producers to shoot their own with fair prices, but also to collect statistics sales grouped for better traceability.

Thus, while the Government is making efforts to revive production, emphasis is placed on the improvement of marketing channels, which comes naturally from the improvement of the quality of the cocoa beans so that they meet the growing requirements of the international market.