Entering cocoa business in Sub-Saharan Africa: the case of Cameroon

Abstract

The culture of cocoa is one the main drivers of Cameroonian economy, bringing many promises in term of employment and revenues. The business organization around cocoa is developing, taking into consideration, the strategy of economic development deployed by the country, its image as the fifth producer of the world and the opportunity for Cameroon to answer the market increasing demand. We have developed in this paper the business organization around cocoa in Cameroon, the implication for people and administration, its potentialities in term of development and the rules to know when entering cocoa business in Cameroon. When we undertook to work on this topic for the master thesis, it was to connect both 'our project of developing cocoa business in Cameroon' and 'the analysis of local cocoa market and its connections to the international market'. Many sources of data have been analyzed including the information collected through the Internet, the Ministry of Agriculture in Cameroon, the Ministry of Trade, the provincial delegation of agriculture of Centre, cocoa buyers’ information such as Telcar, Sic-Cacao and the Cocoa Development Corporation with is the State corporate, developing cocoa seeds and training farmers. After reviewed the literature and meeting with people, we undertook the analysis of cocoa business organization. Interestingly, the results revealed the implication of local government and the effort they are putting together to reach their objective of positioning Cameroon by 2022 as the second producer of cocoa beans with more than 600.000 tons a year. Reaching such objective means develop business opportunities in term of production, increase export capacity to capture more value and develop local pre-transforming units.