Bad roads a bane of cocoa farmers

Inhabitants of Kake and the Mile 1 neighbourhood face a lot of difficulty in their daily activities due to the constant rains and bad roads. Though rain is good to farmers, it is received with mixed feelings by inhabitants who prefer the dry season, even though it is bad for crops.

This, in turn, affects cocoa buyers and dealers in the main cocoa zone in Cameroon. A cocoa dealer in Kumba, Southwest Region, who is the world's fourth biggest grower of the commodity, said his cocoa was delayed for two weeks before he was finally able to transport it.

Mekoli's farm in Kumbe-Balondo village is only around 50km from Kumba, but the road from Kumbe-Balondo to the commercial centre in Kumba is in a deplorable state. Hence Mekoli eventually found an all-season vehicle to transport his cocoa to Kumba, but at what price? He had to pay FCFA 2,000 per bag instead of the FCFA 500 he usually pays per bag in the dry season. Worse still, by the time he finally got to Kumba, the market price had dropped.

"I called vehicle owners in Kumba to come to Kumbe-Balondo and evacuate my cocoa to the market, but they told me they could not come because the bad state of the road will ruin their vehicles," he said. "At the time cocoa was selling in Kumba at FCFA 800-900 per kg. Now that I have managed to bring my cocoa here today, the price has gone down to FCFA 720. Just see for yourself how much I have lost," he lamented.

Poor transport infrastructure is one of the greatest obstacles to trade in Cameroon, making it hard for poor farmers to get their produce to market in good enough condition to fetch the highest prices, and that consequently drives up overheads.

The World Bank, some years back, promised to provide $201 million in loans and grants to improve road and rail links between Cameroon and neighboring Chad and Central African Republic; countries it observed had "some of the least functional traffic connections of any area in the world."

As the link to the Atlantic coast for the other countries, Cameroon will get the lion's share of the World Bank funds. But such investments for major traffic arteries are unlikely to trickle down to the level of small roads linking farms and villages to provincial trading towns like Kumba.

"Going to most remote villages where farmers produce a lot of cocoa, you actually get the picture of the difficulties people in this area face; they produce a lot of cocoa but can't evacuate them to market centres.

Sometimes, they get stuck in mud during evacuation and their crops become humid, attracting a low price." The rainy season in the Southwest lasts most of the year and keeps the lush landscape wet enough for cocoa trees. But too much rain brings its own problems, creating the perfect environment for humidity-loving fungal diseases and making bean drying a struggle against the elements.

The European Union provided 2,500 drying ovens in 2001, helping eliminate the contamination of beans sometimes caused by locally made wood or coal-fired ovens, or roadside drying. But many farmers say there are not enough new ovens to go round, making it hard to deliver well-dried beans to buyers.

Apart from the weather, farmers complain that they are also squeezed by buying agencies, to which many growers are perpetually in debt for fertilizers and pesticides advanced on credit."The cocoa farmer ... is not a rich man, in spite of his labour.”

Cameroon is one of the largest cocoa production countries in the world but has no technical development to improve on the production system especially in the Southwest Region.

The growth of the cocoa sector in Cameroon is handicapped by poor quality of cocoa production. As a result of this farmer apathy, Cameroon has good and bad cocoa that is mixed together. Cameroon produces fair fermented cocoa as opposed to good fermented cocoa” as measured by the level of defects, though Cameroon wants to produce more cocoa and wants better prices despite the negative fair tag.

The price of cocoa per kg is FCFA 130, which is very low to encourage the farmers grow more, earn more and improve on their lives. As a result of this not-encouraging situation, production is bound to be low. Statistics have shown that there is no fundamental challenge, following the sustainability of smaller holder farmers producing some 240,000 tons.

In case the farmer gets 1,000 pound a ton, and if you divide that 240 million by 600,000 farmers, the figures are not encouraging. The money they will use to buy chemicals and pesticide to treat the cocoa for production, including transport fares, further squeezes the farmers.

In an interview, George Njeck, a cocoa farmer in the Mbonge Subdivision in Southwest Region said: “We need money more than the Cameroon Government,” while explaining that it is in order to improve on their productivity. Elvis Tekuh, a cocoa farmer in the Mbonge Subdivision averred; “It is very difficult to dry cocoa now using the natural means, so we are now forced to use the artificial method because of rain.”

He further explained that, each individual builds his/her oven behind his house. “The Government also helps in donating ovens to us, but it was about 10 years ago since SOWEDA gave us ovens.” In relation to school resumption, he said: “It’s very difficult to cope with the situation.”

There are cooperatives like PALA2C, PPDMVCC, and ACEFA that empower the farmers financially and technically and also FIMAC, which gives out loans to farmers, though the money is never adequate to improve on farmers’ productivity.