Nfamewih Aseh
3 April 2008
The last transporters' strike action in Cameroon, which lasted a whole week, from Monday February 25 to Friday February 29, 2008, and virtually paralysed the whole country, exposed some major weaknesses in our national planning strategies and pointed down the road to where emphasis are necessary.
That the strike had hardly gone into its third day and long queues were already found in front of bakery shops where people were desperately looking for bread, is a major indication of how dependent Cameroonians are on their own soil said to be a land of food self-sufficiency.
Available data indicates that Cameroon does not future anywhere among the global food producing countries. Even Africa as a whole, which is said to be a "bush", does not match its status as a "bush" continent where its inhabitants are making good use of the bushes in growing food. Yet no development can occur anywhere in the world where a majority of the population are not food growers.
Throughout the world, maize or corn, for example, is widely cultivated and constitutes the bigger mass of grain that is produced each year more than any other grain. It is one of the three most important cereal crops in the world, followed only by rice and wheat, and it is also the most important cereal crop in sub-Saharan Africa.
But on the global production scale, while our concept of development is to be hostile to the environment or run to the USA, the USA alone produces almost half of the world's harvest, recording 280 metric tonnes in 2005.
With the exception of South Africa that comes closer to the top global maize producing countries such as China, Brazil, France and Indonesia, amongst other countries that are trailing the USA, producing about 12 metric tons of maize in 2005, no other African country has a world record of being a maize producer.
Statistics gleaned from FAO records indicate that in the year 2000 alone 589 million tonnes of maize were produced throughout the world on a total surface area of 138 million hectares. Out of that total quantity of global maize produced that year, the USA alone emerged as the world's champion in maize production, producing 43 percent of the world's maize.
This was followed by Asia with 25 percent production and Latin America and the Caribbean trailing with 13 percent with Africa producing a paltry 7 percent of the world's maize. Yet maize is a major food crop in sub-Saharan Africa, constituting the main dietary staple for about 50 percent of the population.
In the eastern and southern regions of the continent annual consumption levels of up to 79 kg per capita was recorded with 125 kg per capita recorded in Kenya alone.Although when it comes to plantain production, West/Central Africa produces about 60 percent of the world's plantain, with an annual production of about 28 million tonnes, followed only by Latin America and the Caribbean, Cameroon does not champion any food growing activity, not even maize which is a dietary staple of over 50 percent of its population.
Instead a general decline in food production has been witnessed since the 1930s. This is attributable to a number of factors, among them the changes that resulted from the shift of attention from food crop production to cash crop production, notably cocoa and coffee, which constituted a considerable part of the post-colonial macro economy of Cameroon.
Between 1977 and 1985, which were the oil boom years, coffee and cocoa prices rose at the international markets. This was closely followed by lesser implied taxation on coffee and cocoa production by government which greatly contributed in encouraging farmers to shove attention towards coffee and cocoa production.
These years were equally marked by the rural-urban population imbalances in which a rapid urban population growth also corresponded to a rapid rural population decline. This encouraged food production in the rural areas to support its growing urban population, but mainly by households on small scale with no large scale economic orientations.
Ousseynou Ndoye and David Kaimowitz (1999) has shown that in 1984 alone farmers in the Southwest Province and the Mungo Valley who had swung their focus towards the cultivation of cocoa and coffee used 458,000 hectares of land for the cultivation of cocoa and coffee as opposed to 342,000 hectares of land that was used for food crop production.
On the average, this was noticeable among individual farmers within this region who used 1.1 hectares of land for cocoa and/or coffee with only a paltry 0.8 hectares for food crop production.
Reports from the Ministry of Agriculture (1987) also point to the fact that there has been a shift of attention from food crop production to cash crop production during the period between the 1960s and 1980s when cash crop production was a steady source of income to cash crop farmers before the financial fluctuations that hit the global economy in the late 1980s.
Blanford et. al. (1994) estimates that between 1978 and 1985 agriculture's share of GDP dropped from 29.3 percent to 20.5 percent, and its share of exports also dropped very drastically from 87 percent to 27 percent especially that cocoa and coffee were seen to be more of income earners than food growing,
coupled with the fact that government increased cocoa prices in the late 1970s to FCFA 420 per kilo which stimulated cocoa production especially in a situation where the population had to meet with rising financial burdens such as taxation, children's school fees, and other financial exigencies that came along with the introduction of a cash nexus economy.
The high-ceilinged cocoa and coffee prices that was experienced internationally between 1977 and 1986 plus government's increase in its spending on fertilizers and pesticides subsidies to cocoa and coffee growers that rose from 42 billion FCFA between 1971 and 1975 to 336 billion FCFA in the period between 1981 and 1985 (Blanford et. al. 1994; World Bank 1988), also seem to have been unfavorable to food crop production coupled with the fact that during that same period government also made huge investments in the expansion of para-statals for agro-industrial plantations.
This general trend that led to a stagnation in food crop production in the Humid Forest Zone of Cameroon, which include the Southwest, East, South, Centre, and Littoral provinces (Ndoye and Kaimowitz 1999), could partly explain the decline in food production in Cameroon, which meant a reduction in the staple food supply of the citizens coupled with the fact that government policies also favoured the importation of some food items which are sometimes sold cheaper in the local markets.
Unfortunately too, their active involvement in cash crop production such as cocoa that was destined for international markets did not transform Cameroonian cocoa or coffee farmers into wealthy people either although a few Licence Buying Agents and some government officials made some considerable gains from the cocoa and coffee sector at the expense of the farmers themselves who received lower percentages of the international cocoa and coffee prices (Conte et. al. 1995).
However, following the declining years of the 1990s when government subsidies and the provision of social services were withdrawn plus the 1994 devaluation of the FCFA by 50% there was an attempt by cocoa and coffee growers to abandon the sector in favour of food crop production.
But this was limited by both agricultural methods that depended on fallowing for the recovery of soil health and the maintenance of ecological balance on the one hand, and on the other hand by the fact that food crop production was not much of a high income earner as did cocoa and coffee.
For those reasons the rural population who still enjoyed a low population density cultivated only food that could barely meet the needs of the household and sold off just what was left of it to the urban consumers to supplement what they could not produce although this trend is changing.
Another factor that led to the decline of food crop production in Cameroon has been attributed to the lack of state subvention to food crop framers. Although the first two Five Year Development Plans of 1960 and 1970 devoted much attention to agriculture, it favoured only certain food crops such as rice production in north Cameroon and so was not backed by a substantial state subvention to other food crop farmers within the framework of its policy implementation to have encouraged large scale food crop farmers necessary to ensure food security for the population.
A combination of urbanism and formal education that laid stress on public service employment and gave a false impression of being a means to a good life, caused a sociological cataclysm in which the younger generation was systematically abandoning agricultural activities in preference to paying jobs and enjoying life within the modern setting.
This created a rural urban migration that caused a drop in the rural food-crop-producing population (Van Soest 1985) and an increase in the population of "idle" urban consumers.
This trend was also reinforced by two factors. Firstly, farming within the modern context was perceived to be a menial job fit only for the "uneducated", and secondly food crop farming became less rewarding in which the activities of food crop farmers were devalued, all of which contributed in discouraging popular participation in food production.
This segregated the economy into two segments: the rural "illiterate" segment which stuck to agricultural production as the only option available to them and the fast growing urban segment which was and is still dependent on the rural diminishing population for food supply.
This sociological cataclysm though not linear as some "illiterates" were to constitute part of the urban segment, having abandoned food production, naturally, meant that food production was to be ineluctably linked to the diminishing of the rural "illiterate" population and varied in direct proportion to that. Yet we need to grow our food to eat whether the constitution is revised or not.
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