Cameroon to Help Cotton Farmers With Increased Fertilizer Costs

By Pius Lukong

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Cameroon’s government will help cotton farmers with increased fertilizer costs in an effort to raise production and insulate the industry from the worst of the global recession, Finance Minister Essimi Menye said.

The government plans to invest more than 6 billion CFA francs ($13 million) into Sodecoton, the state-owned cotton company to buy fertilizer to distribute to farmers, he told reporters yesterday in the capital, Yaounde.

While the government has previously rejected the concept of providing subsidies to farmers, arguing that it stifles world competition, it will make an exception this year “to save a precarious situation,” Menye said.

A 40 percent rise in the cost of fertilizer during the past three years has led to a 35 percent fall in the number of cotton producers, Hamadou Nouhou, technical director of the Cameroon Professional Cotton Producers’ Association, said on April 11.

Production this year is as a result expected to fall to about 150,000 metric tons, half the quantity that was produced in 2007, Nouhou said. Cotton, mostly grown by about 227,500 small-scale farmers in the north of the country, is Cameroon’s fifth-largest foreign-exchange earner.

Producer subsidies in richer nations have depressed global prices, threatening the livelihood of millions of people in developing countries, the International Monetary Fund has said.

Sodecoton is 59 percent-owned by the government, while the rest is held by the Compagnie Francaise de Developement du Textile.

To contact the reporter on this story: Pius Lukong in Yaounde via Johannesburg at areed12@bloomberg.net