The port city of Douala is still a major hub for international food aid heading to Chad and Central African Republic, but the World Food Programme (WFP) in Cameroon is buying an increasing amount of its requirements locally. Of the 70,000mt of food aid WFP’s regional office in Cameroon is forwarding to emergencies in neighbouring countries this year, about 26,000mt has been produced in Cameroon. WFP told IRIN that the percentage of food it purchases in West and Central Africa for distribution in the region grew from 13 percent in 2005, to over 30 percent for 2007 with Cameroon being the largest supplier followed by Burkina Faso. That means a dramatic reduction in transport times and costs. It has also created income for local suppliers and producers and that has trickled down into the communities.
It makes a lot of sense as countries like Cameroon often produce surpluses,” said WFP logistician Boubacar Diop. But there are also risks, he said. “We’re encouraging farmers to grow more and more,” he said. If the emergencies in the region end then WFP will stop buying and the farmers could get stuck with a lot of unwanted food. Even worse, if WFP were to buy up too much locally-produced food, prices for local consumers could rise and that could lead to food insecurity for the poor. “The worst thing that could happen is that in trying to stop a famine in one place we create a famine in another,” Doip said.
Such risks are a daily concern for Cameroon WFP Regional Director Jean-Pierre Cebron. “We are procuring food [in northern Cameroon] in a very fragile environment where rainfall is unpredictable,” he said. “If there were to be a drought we’d be in big trouble,” he said. “Overall it’s a good thing that WFP is stimulating local production as well as providing incentives to farmers to meet international standards of food quality,” he said. “We just have to do it carefully.”
The pros
Many of the local entrepreneurs from the north who supply WFP with sorghum are chiefs and elders in the villagers where the food is procured and they have close and complex relationships with the farmers from whom they buy. “Everyone in our communities is benefiting,” Ousmanou Ballo, who in April supplied WFP with 1500mt of sorghum and 744mt of beans, told IRIN. “Farmers have more work, as do transporters. Even our animals get more to eat from the part of the food aid that is thrown away after processing”. Aboubakari Fadil, another of WFP’s suppliers, predicted that because of WFP’s purchases in 2007, local food production in their area will increase next season. “They are creating added demand,” he said.
He says he is not too worried if the humanitarian crises in nearby countries suddenly ends and WFP were to stop buying. “We have a culture of storing; we never throw away anything,” he said. “We have the ability to store food for two years at a time so if there is a surplus of one cereal then the following year the farmers will produce another cereal or they’ll produce cotton,” Fadil said. And if, on the other hand, demand from WFP were to suddenly increase, he could quickly increase supply, he said.
“Food aid will always be a small percentage of our business. Mostly we sell to commercial traders in the region,” Fadil said. Indeed stocks of sorghum and maize in the central market in Douala dwarfed those in the WFP warehouses. The cereal sellers there said their clients mostly ship the cereal to ports along the central African coast as far as Angola. Fadil said that in cereal markets in the north the largest buyers are currently from Nigeria on Cameroon’s western border. But if the crises in countries east of Cameroon were to suddenly end, reducing demand for food aid, then normal trade would bounce back. “Traditionally we exported a lot of cereals to Chad and Sudan and we see no reason why we will not export there again once things return to normal,” he said.
The cons
WFP officials spoke more cautiously. “It is difficult for us to gauge how much cereal is really available and we know that we need to help suppliers and transporters build their capacities to deliver on time,” WFP Regional Procurement Officer Brigitte Labbé told IRIN. “Up until now they have had trouble meeting our deadlines.” The suppliers IRIN spoke with said their capacity to deliver would be adequate if only WFP gave them more lead time. “In April WFP gave us all just 30 days to fill their orders,” supplier Maliki Dahirou said. “All the suppliers were completing to buy the same sorghum from the same farmers.”
According to Fadil, who filled an order for WFP in April for 1,250mt of sorghum, “The farmers saw how desperate we were to buy from them so obviously they raised their prices. Then after WFP’s orders were filled, demand for sorghum dropped and the price crashed.” he said. He and the other suppliers said that WFP would have a less volatile effect on the local cereal market if it staggered orders and gave them more lead time. But Labbé said that’s not the way WFP works. “A purchase is usually directly related to a particular donation for a food crisis. Rarely can we purchase food with long lead times and certainly not before farmers start planting”.
