COMMENTARY; CAMEROON’S RURAL SECTOR DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY AND NATIONAL AGRICULTURE INVESTEMENT PLAN 2020-2030

By Dr Michael Njume Ebong

Cameroon’s unique assets: At his swearing-in ceremony of 06 November 2018,  the President of the Republic, His Excellency Paul BIYA, made the following solemn promise to the nation: “During the forthcoming seven-year term, we shall strive to consolidate our achievements, while exploring new avenues that can enable us to seize all the opportunities of a constantly changing world… Within this context, it seems appropriate to me that we should seek to develop the sectors of our economy that can significantly reduce our imports of goods and services. The advantage of this policy is that it will allow us to rebalance our chronically negative trade balance. Furthermore, we are going to bring about a real “agricultural revolution” by modernizing our means of production and increasingly processing our agricultural products. This shall be accompanied by the provision of new equipment, storage facilities and access roads. In this way, our status as the breadbasket of central Africa shall be consolidated”. Accordingly, these marching orders by the President for a significant revamp of Cameroon’s agriculture and related sectors provide the substance for the country’s latest Rural Sector Development Strategy (RSDS) and National Agricultural Investment Plan (NAIP), both integrated into a single development blueprint for the rural sector spanning the next ten years: 2020 -2030. The Strategy takes stock of the country’s unique potentials which would seem to justify its ambitious thrust and scales.  Those potentials include, for example:  an overwhelmingly youthful population with an average age of 22 years, abundant, dynamic and qualified labour force in the cities and villages; 7.2 million hectares of arable land and 2 million hectares of pasture land covering about 20% of the national territory; extensive forests covering about 22 million hectares (46% of the territory); rich and abundant biodiversity resources at the heart of the Congo Basin, an impressive network of waterways and more than 4 million hectares of inland water bodies ideal for fishing and aquaculture ventures; and over 400 km-long maritime coastline with 13,000 km² of continental shelf.

Socio-economic profile: The Strategy document equally provides a socio-economic snapshot of Cameroon’s rural sector in 2020, as follows:  the incidence of poverty was estimated at 37.5% in 2014, compared to 39.9% in 2007 (ECAM 4, NIS); the analysis of poverty by region and area of residence showed that the rural population was the most impoverished group, accounting for 66.1% of the national poverty-stricken population; the rural setting which accounts for almost 43.7% of the total population hosts 90% of people living below the poverty line – those with less than CFA 931 francs per day to cover the basic needs (ECAM 4, NIS). While Cameroon has a diversified industrial base consisting of vibrant SMEs/SMIs, these enterprises are however located mainly in the Centre and Littoral Regions, and more particularly in Douala, the economic capital, with 70,082 units (33.5%) and in Yaoundé with 49,970 units (23.9%). These two Regions thus account for close to 60% of the national industrial base. Moreover, the very small enterprises (VSEs) and small-sized enterprises (SEs) represent 98.5% of all the enterprises identified, each employing at most 3 persons on average. Medium-sized enterprises (ME) and large-sized enterprises (LE) account for only 1.3% and 0.2% respectively of the enterprises (RGE-2, NIS). The census results also indicated that 84.2% of the enterprises surveyed are mainly involved in trade (purchase and sale of goods without any transformation) against 15.6% which are active in the secondary sector, and consisting mostly of  small units operating essentially in the agri-food and clothing industries (tailoring workshops) and only 0.2% in the primary/rural sector, which has very few modern enterprises due no doubt to the severe paucity of rural infrastructure.

Village infrastructure at a glance: Limited connectivity or transport and communication access to most Cameroonian villages, which equally translates into their limited access to markets, is perhaps the most important challenge facing rural development efforts in the country.  Decree No. 2017/144 of 20 April 2017 on road nomenclature classifies roads into four categories: motorways, national roads, regional roads and communal roads. Only 7.7% of regional roads are asphalted (table 1). Further, the results of the General Agriculture and Livestock Census (RGAE, 2017) indicate that out of the 14,340 villages in the country, 12% of the villages have markets for the sale of agricultural products (table 2), 6.9% have storage facilities for agricultural products and 1.3% have storage facilities for livestock inputs (table 3). Additionally, almost all of them are inadequately covered by agricultural extension services (table 4). These statistics suggest the extent to which the rural/village sector has been short-changed in the national development process compared to the urban sector.

Table 1: Length (km) of existing regional roads – 2018

Source: MINTP/RSDS/NAIP:2020-2030

Table 2: Proportion of villages with at least one socio-economic infrastructure

Source: Cameroon, RGAE, 2017, RSDS/NAIP:2020-2030

Table 3: Distribution of villages according to the availability of storage facilities for agricultural and livestock products

Source: Cameroon, RGAE, 2017, RSDS/NAIP:2020-2030

Table 4: Proportion of villages with an agricultural extension centre

Source: Cameroon, RGAE 2017/RSDS/NAIP:2020-2030   *Administrative data

Overall assessment of the rural sector: The Strategy document provides a candid assessment of the current state of the rural sector in the country and the reasons for limited impact  of previous strategies, noting in particular that  the rural population continues to suffer from a poverty rate that is significantly higher than the national average: 22% of rural households still suffer from food insecurity compared to only 10.5% of urban households.  Past failures are attributed to a host of factors, such as limited availability of improved planting and animal material; difficulties to access land and to achieve land tenure security; limited follow-up of producers; limited productivity of land; significant postharvest losses;  landlocked production basins; etc.

• Way forward: Based on foregoing diagnosis, the new or revised Strategy aims to be a “breakthrough strategy” that should drive Cameroon to the status of a newly industrialized country by 2030. To that end, the Strategy essentially triples Cameroon’s rural sector production over the next ten years and requires the main stakeholders to: (i) adopt new production methods (technologies and innovations), (ii) find new ways of marketing their products (grouped purchases of inputs and sales of products, purchase contracts, agricultural stock exchange) and (iii) identify new tools for risk management and resilience to disasters (index-based agricultural insurance more accessible to small-scale farmers). Furthermore, tables 1-4 above, which reveal the critical infrastructure needs of Cameroonian villages, clearly summon policymakers to invest massively and comprehensively in the modernization of the village sector in order to galvanize the rural population to higher levels of performance and productivity. In that regard serious consideration should be given within the context of local Councils to constituting the villages into autonomous administrative units administered by the chiefs who would render annual development balance sheets for their respective villages.  Until the  villages receives the pre-eminent priority they deserve as our primary economic foundation blocks, they will continue to be sidelined in the provision of public goods and services, such as roads, electrification, water and sanitation services, housing, quality schools and health services, as worrisomely revealed in tables 1-4 above. Without these assets, our villages – which are the pivot of rural agriculture feeding the nation – will remain forever burdened by negative perceptions of the farming profession, especially by the youth who are called upon to build our agriculture of the next generation. Another strategic area not adequately addressed in the Strategy document is the fundamental need for a secure, stable, and predictable market for rural production, and more particularly for exported cash crops. If fuel and beer prices can be stabilized all over the country, cocoa, coffee, and cotton prices should deserve no less  – they should equally be stabilized for each harvest season. Without these basics the drive towards the goal of  an agricultural revolution in Cameroon would be very bumpy indeed.