MELX views Cameroonian cocoa and coffee

The management of the raw materials stock exchange Mel Commodities Exchange (MELX), headquartered in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire met local economic operators on April 15,2016, in Douala, to raise interest in the activities of this structure.

This meeting which took place at the offices of the Groupement Interpatronal du Cameroun (Gicam – Group of Employers of Cameroon) was mainly meant to attract the interest of exporters and other cocoa and coffee traders, to have them enter the MELX network. “We have decided in 2016 to list all the exported raw materials, particularly cocoa and coffee. Hence this tour in Cameroon to tell cocoa exporters and all those who have physical cocoa in warehouses to come and list it on our system.

We will do the same in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana later on to create a seller index on the cocoa contract, which will become a reference”, explained Loïc Mpanjo Essembe, President of MELX, in an interview given on the eve of the meeting to Commodafrica.

In practical terms, the president of MELX confided, “we are not going to create a stock exchange for agricultural products in Cameroon. The stock exchange remains in Abidjan where all the transactions will be centralised. But, we are opening it to Cameroonian companies who would want to list their raw materials and reduce the number of middlemen.

We have an office in Douala which will work as a clearing house for the products to be transacted on in Cameroon (…) We will also join a network of forwarding agents to enable tracking of the goods throughout the system to, if need be, convert a risk into a margin call to secure the entire transaction from one end to the other”.

Obstructions at the Cameroon Commodities Exchange

Launched in 2014 in Côte d’Ivoire, Mel Commodities Exchange (MELX) is presented as a raw materials stock exchange for Africa. According to its management, this stock exchange got its first contracts in 2015, exclusively in the palm oil sector on which its activities were focused at the start. “To date, we have been able to generate a dozen of contracts on palm oil from Malaysian and Indonesian origin, to validate the feasibility study and check the relevance of the economic model”, Loïc Mpanjo Essembe reveals.

Mel Commodities Exchange should be one step ahead of the Cameroon Commodities Exchange (CCX), the national raw materials stock exchange, which creation process seems to have been stalling since September 2014, at the end of the feasibility study of this project assigned to the firm Eleni LLC, which also created the renowned raw materials stock exchange of Ethiopia.

According to our sources, this firm, which has been waiting for over a year to receive the approval from the Cameroonian government to raise the funds and create, in 12 years, the CCX, is facing opposition from some authorities, who want the local economic operators to be part of this project.

At the same time, we learned, in addition to the project led by the firm Eleni LLC, a second project for the creation of a raw material stock exchange in Cameroon was also brought to the government, who finally ends up with two similar projects and is slow in making the necessary choices.