Cameroon employers decry lack of protection for domestic industry

The Cameroon Employers Association (GICAM) has announced the convening of a debate in Douala on November 11 on the protection of domestic industry through standardization and regulation.

Alarmed that import levels are increasing much faster than those of exports, resulting in an ever mounting net export deficit, employers have drawn the government’s attention to the choice of open trade as the main orientation of its economic policy.

For GICAM, the threat to external financing of the local economy is likely to get worse, thanks to a global context marked by the acceleration of the dismantling of barriers to international trade and outsourcing.

These risks are real in a situation characterized by a slowdown in global growth, the recovery of which are slower and less perceptible than expected as the engines of development are currently down or stalled, the association observed.

It said this is coupled with domestic threats, which are the security and humanitarian crises raging in the eastern and the far northern regions of the country.

Referring to the structuring of the national economy, GICAM noted that the country remains heavily dependent on the one hand, on primary and extractive activities and, on the other, on trade and service activities, although the need for industrialization is recognized in its 2035 development vision blueprint.

The employers believe that the industry suffers particularly from structural constraints such as difficult access to financing, inadequate skilled labor, infrastructure deficits, inadequate internal market and pressure from the informal sector.

Results from the business census conducted in 2009 by the National Statistics Institute (NSI) on 94,000 listed companies showed that only 13 percent of companies essentially engage in processing activity.

The share value of manufacturing added to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) further increased from 19.3 percent in 2000 to 16.7 percent in 2010. Several industrial sectors are thus penalized by customs policy which paradoxically encourages import of finished products at the expense of raw materials.

At the same time, the many failures in the implementation of policies and procedures as regards the monitoring of markets put them on trial, in a particularly harsh competitive environment involving imported products which sometimes take illicit trade channels.

These threats, GICAM warned, are expected to worsen with the prospect of many trade agreements under negotiation, including the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) which is being implemented with the European Union.