Cameroon clamps down on contraband cocoa

Yaounde — A crackdown by Cameroon on the sale of cocoa beans to unlicensed buyers from Nigeria has left farmers in two border regions with tonnes of beans piling up in warehouses before the start of the main harvest in October, say a producers’ union and farmers.

Most licensed agents in Cameroon are unwilling to buy in the area because they would have to haul the beans along a dangerous 350km stretch of road to the port of Douala, they said. Gunmen have been attacking trucks on the road. 

Cameroon, the world’s fourth-biggest cocoa producer, does not officially export beans to Nigeria. But beans are smuggled there from its South West and North West regions, which together account for about 40% of the country’s cocoa output.

Cameroon authorities have blamed the country’s inability to exceed a targeted annual harvest of 300,000 metric tons on the illicit trade.

Trade minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana estimated that up to 20% of Cameroon’s output in the 2022-2023 season was smuggled out of the country, resulting in a loss of about 10-billion CFA francs ($17m) in taxes and exit duties, and more than $103m in foreign earnings.

Atangana issued an order in June banning unlicensed bean shipments across Cameroon’s land border into Nigeria.

Cocoa smuggling increased in recent years due to conflict in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions, according to Arrey Elvis Ntui, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think-tank based in Brussels.

“The violence and mass displacement of people disrupted cocoa farming,” Ntui said. “Then, as emerging anglophone rebel militias blocked the main roads, moving cocoa ... to the commercial hub in the francophone part almost ground to a halt.”

The conflict erupted in 2016, when government forces crushed a peaceful movement of anglophone teachers and lawyers protesting perceived marginalisation by the country's French-speaking majority. The unrest has since turned into a prolonged separatist insurgency.

Tabe Oben Bessong, president of the Manyu Cocoa Producers’ Union, which groups hundreds of farmers in the South West region, said that about 120 metric tons of beans were stuck in a warehouse in the border town of Ekok.

Producers have been unable to sell after the ban, and beans keep piling up, he said.

Bessong said that when the crisis intensified in 2018 most major cocoa buyers and farmers left. Exporters pulled their staff from the region as separatist fighters torched trucks that attempted to transport cocoa to Douala.

The absence of local buyers pushed more farmers and middlemen to turn to Nigeria, he said.

Farmers said that selling to middlemen from Nigeria also fetches a higher price. They offer 2,000 CFA francs a kg, compared with Cameroon’s official farmgate price of about 1,200 CFA francs.

“The government should give us a waiver,” Bessong said, urging the government to set a fee that producers could pay to legally export their cocoa to Nigeria.

Michael Ndoping, GM of Cameroon’s cocoa regulator, the National Cocoa and Coffee Board, told Reuters, that the ban will be lifted if farmer co-operatives and individual exporters regularise their status and respect the laws on cocoa export.

Reuters