29/04/2026
China donates rice worth 1.6 billion FCFA to Cameroon.
At first glance, this sounds like good news. Food support is always welcome, especially in difficult times. But if you look a bit deeper, it raises a more uncomfortable question:
Why are we still receiving basic food aid in a country with strong agricultural potential?
This is not about rejecting help. It’s about understanding what this kind of aid reveals about our agri-food system.
Cameroon is not a desert. We have fertile land, diverse agro-ecological zones, and a large population already engaged in farming. Rice, in particular, is not a foreign crop to us. It is grown locally in places like Ndop, Maga, and Yagoua. Yet local production consistently falls short of national demand.
So what’s the real issue?
It’s not just production. It’s the entire system.
We have:
- Weak irrigation infrastructure, making production seasonal and unreliable
- Limited access to quality seeds and mechanization
- Poor post-harvest handling, leading to significant losses
- Inadequate processing capacity, which affects quality and market competitiveness
- Market systems that favor imports over local produce
Now here’s the key point:
This aid is raw food (rice), not processed products.
Which means:
We are not only struggling with transformation and value addition…
We are still struggling with basic food sufficiency.
That’s a structural problem.
Because a functional agri-food system should be able to:
1. Feed its population with staple crops
2. Process and add value locally
3. Compete with imports in both quality and price
When any one of these fails, you start depending on external supply. When all three weaken, you start depending on aid.
And aid, no matter how well-intentioned, is not a long-term strategy. It can stabilize a situation temporarily, but it doesn’t fix the underlying inefficiencies.
If anything, moments like this should push us to ask tougher questions:
- Why is local rice still less competitive than imported rice?
- What policies are discouraging large-scale and efficient production?
- Where exactly are the bottlenecks in our value chain?
- Are we investing enough in agricultural engineering, irrigation, and storage systems?
Because the solution is not complicated in theory:
Invest in production systems.
Strengthen value chains.
Support local processors.
Make local food competitive.
Until then, we will keep celebrating food donations…
while sitting on land that could feed us.