Crackdown on cocoa smuggling hits farmers in Cameroon conflict zone

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 ahead of the start of the main harvest in October, a producers' union and farmers told Reuters. Most licensed agents in Cameroon are unwilling to buy in the area because they would have to haul the beans along a 350 km stretch of road where trucks have been attacked by armed separatist groups to get them to the port of Douala, they said.

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 ahead of the start of the main harvest in October, a producers' union and farmers told Reuters.

Most licensed agents in Cameroon are unwilling to buy in the area because they would have to haul the beans along a 350 km stretch of road where trucks have been attacked by armed separatist groups to get them to the port of Douala, they said. 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 around 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% percent 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 ($17 million) in taxes and exit duties, and over $103 million in foreign earnings.

Atangana issued an order last month banning unlicensed bean shipments across Cameroon's land border into Nigeria. Cocoa smuggling has increased in recent years due to the armed 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, told Reuters around 120 metric tons of beans were stuck in a warehouse in the border town of Ekok. Producers have been unable to sell following 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 added.

Farmers told Reuters that selling to middlemen from Nigeria also fetches a higher price. They offer 2,000 CFA francs per kg, compared with Cameroon's official farmgate price of around 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, General Manager of Cameroon's cocoa regulator the National Cocoa and Coffee Board, told Reuters, that the ban will be lifted if farmer cooperatives and individual exporters regularise their status and respect the laws on cocoa export. ($1 = 582.2200 Central African CFA franc BEAC)

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