Producing what we import: three locks, and what can actually be done about them

Let us begin with a figure that ought to keep us awake.

Cameroon has an installed cocoa processing capacity of roughly 250,000 tonnes. It processes about 96,000. In other words: more than 150,000 tonnes of grinding capacity already exist, have already been paid for, and are standing idle.

Over the same period, the country imported 466.9 billion FCFA worth of cereals in 2025 — including 268.7 billion of rice and 187.8 billion of wheat.

We export the bean. We import the flour. And in between, plants are waiting.

Import dependence is not a cultural inevitability. It is the product of an economic model — and a model can be dismantled. Provided one dismantles the right part of it.

We often hear that Cameroonian banks strangle production with prohibitive rates. Central bank figures call for a qualification — and that qualification changes the strategy entirely.

In the first quarter of 2026, the average rate on new loans extended in Cameroon stood at 9.03%. That is the lowest level in the CEMAC zone, whose average reaches 12.38%. When "12%" is quoted for Central Africa, what is quoted is a regional average that Cameroon pulls downwards.

The problem lies elsewhere, and it is more severe.

Two mechanisms remain entirely accurate, and they are enough to explain the lock.

The premium on the short term. An import operation offers a cash cycle measured in weeks. A processing unit, in years. At comparable perceived risk, a banker prefers fast rotation — that is not bias, it is a rational preference for liquidity. The productive project is penalised by the very duration that creates its value.

Repayment schedules that ignore biological cycles. Instalments fall due before the first livestock batch or the first harvest has generated any revenue at all. The project then defaults because of its financing structure, not its operations.

In fairness: no public statistics document the repayment structure of agricultural loans in Cameroon. This is a field observation, repeated across the files we see, but not a measured fact.

When a State draws most of its revenue from taxing goods crossing the border rather than from value produced inside it, two effects compound.

The first is budgetary. Developing local production means, in the short term, shrinking the customs base. The trade-off between tomorrow’s revenue and this quarter’s is never neutral for an administration that has to balance a budget.

The second is political. Where market access runs through an administrative authorisation, that authorisation becomes a resource in itself. It rewards commercial intermediation — little capital, quick returns — at the expense of industrial investment, which ties up money and pays back late.

We thus produce traders where we wanted industrialists. Not for want of individual will, but because the system rewards precisely that.

Exporting raw and re-importing processed is the costliest of the three mechanisms, because it is the most discreet: it presents itself as an export success.

The Mbalam iron ore project offers a measure of it, using its own announced figures. First exports expected in the first quarter of 2026. 10 million tonnes per year in phase one, with a target of 25 million from 2030. Projected fiscal and para-fiscal revenue for the State: approximately 3 billion US dollars over the life of the project, for more than 500 million tonnes extracted through to 2050.

Let us do the division.

Three thousand six hundred francs per tonne of a non-renewable resource. One direct job per 71,000 tonnes extracted.

The problem is not that these figures are wrong. The problem is that they are normal for raw exports.

Value is not created at extraction. It is created at processing — and it stays where the processing happens.

The diagnosis is structural. It is not frozen. Three recent developments, all verifiable, run counter to the rent model — and none is yet being fully used by project sponsors.

Import substitution is producing measurable results. The cereal import bill fell from 543.6 to 466.9 billion FCFA between 2024 and 2025. A reduction of 76.7 billion in a single year, or −14.1%. That is not a policy intention: it is a line in the trade balance.

A guarantee fund now covers half the risk. The agricultural bank announced in 2011 was shelved in 2018. In its place, an agricultural guarantee fund was created by Prime Ministerial decree on 22 March 2023: two compartments — agricultural value chains on one side, livestock and fish farming on the other — each with a 50% partial guarantee mechanism attached to approved banks, and a refinancing facility for microfinance institutions. Its resources come from two projects co-financed by the State and the African Development Bank, endowed with 75 and 65 billion FCFA respectively.

A facility has just opened for the segment nobody was financing. On 16 September 2026, a facility endowed with roughly 14 billion FCFA was launched in Yaoundé, funded by the Central African Forest Initiative with the Ministry of the Economy. Its target is stated explicitly: enterprises "facing difficulty crossing the threshold between microfinance and conventional bank credit". Which is to say, precisely the Cameroonian agro-industrial SME: too large for the microfinance institution, judged too risky by the bank.

And the State is forcing timber processing — by constraint. An order dated 28 April 2026 raised to 91 the number of species banned from export as logs, up from 76. A regional commitment provides for a total ban from 1 January 2028. It is the clearest example of a State deliberately giving up immediate export revenue in order to impose processing on home soil.

The European Union Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026 to large and medium-sized enterprises and to the entire timber sector. From 30 June 2027 to micro and small enterprises. The Commission published a simplification package on 4 May 2026 and indicated there would be no third postponement.

Cocoa, coffee, rubber, oil palm, timber: the value chains concerned are precisely those that make up our exports. A chain that has not geolocated its plots will lose its European outlet. That holds for raw and processed goods alike.

One structuring point many overlook: the obligation falls on the operator placing the product on the Union market, not on the producer. Financing for compliance must therefore be attached to the party carrying both the obligation and the cash — the exporter or the processor, never the smallholder.

Compliance is not one more administrative burden. It is the market-access condition that makes processing profitable.

Of the three locks, only one is a matter for public decision — and we have just said we will not be lifting it. The other two are within reach of work.

The banking lock is made of evidence, and evidence can be manufactured.

• A financial model delivered open, formulas visible, which the analyst can test by changing the assumption they dispute.
• A review by a third party separate from whoever drafted the study, with a reasoned opinion — including an unfavourable one.
• Enforceable security interests structured with a notary.
• Milestone-based disbursement under an escrow agreement, where funds are released only against technical sign-off verified on site.
• A repayment schedule aligned to the actual biological cycle, not to the accounting year.

None of these instruments is an innovation. They are standards, applied systematically where they are rarely applied at all.

The value-chain lock is made of positioning, and positioning is decided project by project. For each of the 29 value chains we reference, the question is the same: how far up to go — conditioned raw product, business-to-business ingredient, finished product, or by-product valorisation? And above all: what does that tier demand in equipment, compliance and market access?

That is the meaning of our doctrine — Produce, Process, Export — and the order of the three terms is not decorative. One exports only after having processed.

The moment is unusual. A guarantee fund covers half the credit risk. A 14-billion facility has just opened for mid-sized enterprises. Import substitution removed 76.7 billion from the cereal bill in a single year. And a European regulatory deadline is forcing entire value chains to document themselves before 30 December.

Meanwhile, 150,000 tonnes of grinding capacity are waiting to be supplied.

What is most lacking today is neither financial resources nor industrial capacity: it is the file capable of connecting the two.

It cannot be decreed. It has to be built. And that is a profession.

Credit data are from the Bank of Central African States, relayed by Investir au Cameroun (16 June 2026 for Q1 2026; 21 March 2025 for the SME and large enterprise split as at end-September 2024). Cereal import figures are from the National Institute of Statistics, relayed on 1 April 2026. Mbalam project figures are from Investir au Cameroun (12 December 2025); the mining share of GDP from Agence Ecofin (21 May 2025); the per-tonne ratio is the author’s calculation from those projections. The agricultural guarantee fund is documented by Investir au Cameroun; the facility of 16 September 2026 by the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development (21 September 2026). The EU Deforestation Regulation timetable follows the Hogan Lovells analysis of 15 May 2026.

Cocoa processing volumes come from a September 2026 press review and remain to be cross-checked against the audited report of the National Cocoa and Coffee Board. Credit data relate to the first quarter of 2026; value-chain prices vary during the season.