Sodecoton guarantees bumper crop

LEADING THE FIELD Sodecoton manages the majority of Cameroon’s annual cotton output of 230,000 tons.

Cameroon produces some 230,000 tons of cotton a year and Sodecoton manages most of this output. Based in northern Cameroon, the company buys cotton from 350,000 small farmers and refines and sells it at home and abroad.
Last year Sodecoton made a profit and, as processed cotton is sold in dollars, also enjoyed high exchange rates against the local currency. This year, dumping on the commodity markets and large-scale subsidies for U.S. and European Union cotton farmers have forced prices down to their lowest levels since 1986. “There is too much cotton at a time when world consumption has gone down from 21 million tons of fiber to about 18 million tons,” says Mohammed Iya, Sodecoton’s director. “We cannot compete with American and European producers. They can afford to sell at prices that we can’t offer.” Mr. Iya recognizes that the International Cotton Advisory Council in Washington D.C. can do little about the U.S. and E.U. policy as it represents a defence against the invasion of quality synthetic fibers.

Cameroon’s Minister of Industrial and Commercial Development, Mello Bouba Maïgari, believes there are ways to turn the tables. “Cameroon produces cotton of good quality which permits us to envisage the development of spinning, particularly of unbleached linen which is demanded by U.S. markets. Demands are unlimited in the U.S.,” he says.

Cameroon is one of 16 cotton producing countries, but there is little relation between a Texas cotton farmer, whose land is efficiently irrigated and whose production is highly mechanized, and a northern Cameroon farmer, who has no shared facilities with his neighboring producers and is more than likely to be illiterate.
Sodecoton provides its farmers with everything they need but is currently thwarted by infrastructure problems. “It bothers me that all the trucks are reserved for the oil pipeline operation. There are no trucks reserved to transport fertilizers. I have some goods stored in Douala but there is no way to transport them to my cotton farmers,” says Mr. Iya. Nevertheless, Sodecoton has been an outstanding performer and its privatization, first proposed by the government as long ago as 1990, may be the answer to Mr. Iya’s frustrations. “We want to absorb unemployment, we want to stop rural exodus. There is only one way out: people should develop agriculture. People should come and cultivate cotton.”