Great investment opportunity in cocoa production #cameroon

There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for cocoa.
Reports from the National Cocoa and Coffee Board, NCCB,
say prices per kilogramme of the cash crop witnessed an
all-time high rate in the 2013-2014 farming season.
Farmers received averagely FCFA 1,275 per kilogramme of
the produce, the highest in the last three years. Marketable
production in the 2013-2014 farming season witnessed a
drop of 19,000 metric tons vis-à-vis the previous season to
stand at 209,905 metric tons with 174,629 kg exported to
Holland, Malaysia, Belgium and other countries.
This performance keeps Cameroon on the fourth position on
the African chart of cocoa producing countries and the fifth
in the world after Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia and
Nigeria. This is certainly good news given the dwindling
fortunes of the sector in past years where farmers dumped
cocoa production in favour of food crops which they could
eat and readily sell. The performance is however not good
enough to maximize global opportunities for the
sustainability of the sector both to farmers and the country's
economy.
While production is still largely in the hands of small-holder
farmers, most of whom inherited the old plantations with
archaic farming methods from their ancestors, local
processing is manned by few outfits like SIC Cacaos,
CHOCOCAM and some common initiative groups. Investing
in cocoa production to go even beyond the 2020 mark of
600,000 metric tons would be good to conquer the ready
market of the produce.
Improving on the road network so that inputs get to farmers
early enough to engender better yields as well as nib pests
in the bud and for the produce to get to the market will be
salutary. Only then can all cocoa produced in the country be
channeled into the formal circuit of the economy. This will
equally avert situations where for want of farm-to-market
roads, the produce is sold to neighouring countries and
exported to world markets under such countries at the
detriment of Cameroon.
According to the General Manager of NCCB, Michael
Ndoping, statistics from the International Cocoa
Organisation show that future world demand of the produce
could hit four million metric tons up from the current 3.8
million metric tons. Although the gap between the current
and future productions may just be in the neigbourhood of
200,000 metric tons, bridging it could be an uphill task. This
is more so as giant cocoa producing nations like Côte
d'Ivoire and Ghana are almost seeing their cocoa
production zones exploited beyond any use.
This is an opportunity Cameroon and Nigeria, still parading
huge potentials capable of producing beyond what they
have, can maximize to better their populations and
economies. Cameroon has vast and arable fertile land in the
seven cocoa production regions of the country with good
climate comprising abundant sunshine and rainfall all
favourable for qualitative and quantitative production.
There is no gainsaying therefore that the cocoa sector in the
country is still almost virgin, necessitating viable and
sustainable investments to propel it to a purveyor of
development.