Cameroon too much oil was bad news for cocoa

The government of Cameroon has launched an initiative to revive the country's cocoa and coffee sectors. Tansa Musa reports from Yaounde.

Before Cameroon began exporting oil in 1977, cocoa and coffee were the mainstay of the economy, contributing about 80% of the country's gross domestic product. But after two decades of neglect and a poorly handled economic liberalisation policy, the two sectors now represent only 1.5% of GDP.

Today, with declining oil production and a depressed market for timber, the government has begun looking for ways of reviving the once backbone of the economy.

In August, officials of the ministry of agriculture, researchers, farmers and exporters met in the capital Yaounde (the third time in five years), to examine what went wrong and how to reverse the trend of declining production and poor quality of the country's cocoa and coffee on the world market.

"For a long time after independence and before we started producing oil, cocoa and coffee were the cash cows of our country," Frederic Kodock, agriculture minister, told the participants. "Today these sectors are in crisis, and we cannot by any means afford to abandon them."

The minister blamed widespread poverty and misery in the country today on the crisis affecting the two sectors on which nearly 6 million Cameroonians depend for their livelihood. It was high time, he said, that the government resumed assistance to cocoa and coffee farmers to improve their wellbeing.

He then announced an assistance package for cocoa and coffee producers as the government's contribution to reviving the sectors. This year, he said, the government has allocated CFA 886,830,000 as part of the package. More will come in the years ahead.

The package also includes the provision of direct assistance such as spraying equipment and insecticides to cocoa and coffee farmers. They will also benefit from training workshops.

In an interview with New African, Emmanuel Nguile, vice president of the cocoa producers syndicate (the Syndicat National des Producteurs de Cacao), blamed the declining production on "the brutal disengagement of the state" from the cocoa and coffee sectors in the wake of the economic liberalisation imposed on the country in the 1990s by the IMF and World Bank.

"Because of the economic crisis, the IMF and the World Bank pressured the government to liberalise the economy as a precondition for assistance. Without thinking twice and putting in place safeguards, the authorities just went ahead and withdrew from the cocoa and coffee sectors altogether, abandoning farmers to an uncertain future," he said.

As a result, farmers lost a major source of pre-financing, subsidies in the form of supply of insecticides, the services of extension workers, and farm-to-market roads in some major production zones. Things got worse, Nguile explained, with the imposition of import duties on inputs, making their prices well beyond the reach of farmers.

Sharing the same opinion, Christopher Mbah, the general manager of the North-West Cooperative Association (NWCA), one of the few leading farmer-cooperatives that survived the shock of the economic crisis, said the two sectors also suffered from stiff competition from Asian and Latin American producers and low farm-gate prices.

"The prices the farmers get are rather too low to cover the cost of production, and because of that many of them have decided to abandon their farms and divert into the production of food crops or other productive activities," Mbah explained. Another negative consequence of the economic liberalisation, according to Mbah, was that it opened the doors to many "adventurers" into the cocoa and coffee sectors, resulting in poor quality production.

"You cannot imagine that somebody is buying, processing and exporting important cash crops like coffee and cocoa with no basic technical knowledge of these crops. In some cases, some of them do not master the essential ingredients involved in determining washed and unwashed arabica coffee or even the difference between robusta and arabica," he lamented.

He explained that because of their limited knowledge, adventurer/middle personsjust accept anything from farmers in the name of coffee for export. Farmers, pelted and flattered by ready buyers, do not care to dry their coffee and cocoa properly, hence the declining quality of Cameroonian coffee and cocoa on the world market.

The effect of all this is that for almost two decades now, cocoa production in Cameroon has stagnated around 120,000 tonnes annually, while robusta coffee has dropped from 95,000 tonnes in the 1980s to 65,000 in the 1990s and to 30,000 tonnes today.

Overall, arabica coffee has been the hardest hit, with annual production dropping from 32,000 tonnes in the 1970s to 10,000 in 2001/2002. "Things are awfully bad for arabica production this year," said the director of programmes of the National Cocoa and Coffee Board, Pierre Abena Etoa "And we don't expect the situation to be any better soon, at least not before the next seven to eight years."