Ageing farmers, low-yield crops hinder Cameroon's cocoa ambitions

Cameroon’s ambition to triple cocoa production and become one of the world’s top three producers within a decade is being hampered by a failure to modernise ageing plantations and attract young farmers to the sector.

According to Reuters, booming consumption, particularly in Asia, is expected to inflate demand for the main ingredient in the $100bn chocolate industry by about one million tonnes, or around a quarter of world production, by 2020.

Forecast deficits pushed world prices to 33-months highs last week despite bumper crops from Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s top two producers.

Cameroon, the fifth-biggest grower, earns 250 billion CFA francs ($523m) a year from cocoa, accounting for about half its primary-sector exports.

To ride the growth in demand, it aims to boost output to 600,000 tonnes per year by 2020, but industry experts and farmers are skeptical.

Cameroon’s cocoa output has been erratic.

It has oscillated between record production and sharp drops in recent years blamed on poor weather, disease outbreaks and lack of farming inputs.

Losses due to disease and pests claim between 30 and 40 percent of Cameroon’s harvest, according to the industry regulator, the National Cocoa and Coffee Board.

It forecasts output at 235,000 tonnes this season, although pan-African bank Ecobank said in a research note in March that production will likely slip again to about 190,000 tonnes. Exports were down 26.5 per cent year-on-year in May.