Cameroon

Why this origin matters

Cameroon is a coffee origin that shrank, and its own coffee board has written down how. The board's figures put production at 2.2 million bags at the peak in 1986/87 and marketed production at 409,000 bags in 2015/16; the official total reported for 2024/25 is 11,637 tonnes, which is under 200,000 bags if the tonnes are green coffee, something the reports do not say. The board's 2017 profile, published by the International Coffee Organization, puts that down to low prices and the withdrawal of the state, and calls the loss of dynamism virtually irreversible. The same institutions handle robusta from forest lowlands and arabica from the highlands above them, and the arabica has a variety, Java, selected on the spot against a disease that is widespread in Africa.

Where coffee grows

Coffee is grown in seven of Cameroon's ten regions, on the coffee board's account: Littoral, West, South-West, North-West, East, Centre and South, with some robusta also in the southern part of Adamaoua. Two regions carry it. In the board's regional table, Littoral accounts for 41 per cent of marketed production and West for 36 per cent; South-West has 15 per cent, and no other region more than 3. Robusta dominates in Littoral, above all in the Mungo area, which the profile calls a bastion of robusta, and is the only coffee of the Centre, East and South. Arabica is confined to the West, North-West and South-West. Of the North-West the profile says in one place that it produces only arabica and in another lists it among the robusta regions. The profile puts the area at about 60,000 hectares of robusta and 10,000 of arabica in 2014. It describes the western zone as a set of plateaux: the Bamoun plateau at 1,240 metres, the Bamileke plateau rising to Mount Bamboutos at 2,740 metres, and the volcanic plateaux of Bamenda at 1,800 metres. Those are heights of the landscape, not of coffee farms; the one farm altitude CoffeeHQ read is that of a study plot at Bamendjou in the West, at 1,600 metres.

Species and varieties

Cameroon grows both arabica and robusta (Coffea canephora), and robusta is most of it: about nine bags in ten of marketed production across the twelve seasons the coffee board tabulates, and 10,377 of the 11,637 tonnes reported for 2024/25. The board's profile names no variety of either species. What CoffeeHQ can say about arabica varieties comes from elsewhere. The World Coffee Research catalogue records that Java was brought to Cameroon in the middle of the twentieth century, that the breeder Pierre Bouharmont found it partially tolerant of coffee berry disease and suited to smallholders using few inputs, and that it was released for cultivation there after nearly twenty years of selection. A 2019 paper describes its study farm in the West as planted with a mixture of two varieties, Java and one it calls Jamaïque. No source read gives the share of the area under any variety, and none names a robusta variety or clone. The national grading standards also provide for Liberica, but the profile reports no production of it.

Coffee berry disease, and the variety selected against it

Coffee berry disease is a fungal disease of green arabica fruit, found in Africa. A 2019 paper from field work on a smallholder farm in West Cameroon opens by saying that it has caused massive losses of arabica on the continent, with up to 90 per cent recorded in the work it cites, and that on smallholder farms low incomes hinder the use of chemicals against it. It describes arabica in Cameroon as grown mainly under shade and among other crops, and its own plot as coffee interplanted with plantain bananas.

This is the setting of Java's selection. The World Coffee Research catalogue says the breeder Pierre Bouharmont observed in Cameroon that Java was partially tolerant of the disease and released it there after nearly twenty years of selection, and that it was later sent to Central America partly as a precaution, since the disease is not present there. The catalogue also records that Java, long taken for a Typica selection, has been shown by genetic fingerprinting to come from an Ethiopian landrace population.

The coffee board's profile says something that sits awkwardly beside this: that coffee in recent decades has not been directly affected by 'pandemics', which is the word of its English text, though the berry borer and leaf-eating caterpillars have returned. CoffeeHQ records both statements and cannot reconcile them from what it has read. No figure for losses to the disease in Cameroon is given here, because the paper's figure is for Africa and is its citation of earlier work.

Harvest

The coffee board's profile gives marketing seasons, not harvest months: by regulation, buying and selling of arabica opens on 1 October and closes on 15 September of the following year, and of robusta on 1 December, closing on 15 November. Those dates say when coffee may be traded. For picking, the only months CoffeeHQ found are at second hand: a 2011 thesis gives September to February for arabica and November to mid-February for robusta, and credits a web page of the Food and Agriculture Organization that was not opened. The board's own history page adds one sentence about the plant's year: in March, before the rains, much of the western Grassfields is covered in flowering coffee trees.

How the coffee is processed

The division follows the species. The coffee board's profile says arabica is mainly wet-processed, with a very small part dried in the fruit, and that robusta is dry-processed. Hulling is done in factories owned by cooperatives or by licensed private operators, and coffee is bought from growers after it. The profile describes washing as done grower by grower with individual pulpers, a practice that grew into group systems using a great deal of water, and says compact washing plants introduced under a project of 2009 use 80 to 90 per cent less water than traditional washing stations. It also records an ambition, in the sector's 2014 plan, to build washing stations widely and eventually wash all coffee for export, robusta included. Nothing CoffeeHQ read says how far that has gone.

One pulping machine among thirty-five farmers

The 2011 thesis on arabica growers in the North-West gives the one close view CoffeeHQ has read of washed coffee being made on Cameroonian smallholdings. The method it describes is the familiar one: cherries are pulped by machine, fermented for about a day, washed and dried. Its finding is about access. Of the 35 farmers it interviewed, one owned a pulping machine. The rest depended on a few owners who pulped for a fee, in cash or in coffee, and some spoke of waiting two to four days after picking. The reasons they gave for not owning one were that their quantities were too small, that a machine cost too much for a farm's income, and that they had no access to anyone selling them. The thesis links the delay, together with strip-picking of ripe and unripe fruit by the children and village women hired at the peak of harvest, to the quality faults it lists.

This is one student's interviews in one area fifteen years ago, and it is offered as that. The thesis adds one thing about the market these farmers sold into: that traders in the area neither differentiated coffee by quality nor rewarded it. It is the only account read of how the decline in quality that the board reports after liberalisation looked on a farm, and it does not show that the one caused the other.

How it is graded and sold

Cameroon grades by defects and by bean size, under national standards the coffee board's profile cites by number. Defects are counted in a 300-gram sample on a fixed scale, in which one sour bean counts as three defects, and coffee is classed as Extra-prima, Prima, Superior, Courant or Limite. Size is graded by screen: robusta in grades from GG down to GIII, arabica in lettered types from E and A downwards, and a lot made up of peaberries, called caracolis, can carry that name as well. Export quality is checked by private inspection companies under the board's supervision, and each kilogram exported pays three levies, to the development fund, the interprofessional council and the board. The coffee goes mostly to Europe. Over 2010/11 to 2014/15 the board's tables show Europe taking about 87 per cent of arabica exports, led by Germany, Belgium and Russia, and about 85 per cent of robusta, led by Italy, France and Portugal. For 2024/25 the board is reported as saying that Italy, Algeria and Belgium together took three fifths of the robusta. The profile states that operators in Cameroon no longer produced certified coffee when it was written.

What the grower kept of the export price

The coffee board's profile publishes something few such documents do: the average price paid to growers in each region beside the average export price, season by season from 2010/11 to 2015/16. For robusta the grower's price fell from 745 to 529 CFA francs a kilogram over those six seasons, and the grower's share of the export price from 78 to about 61 per cent. For arabica the grower's price fell from 1,242 to 925 francs, and the share moved between 53 and 85 per cent, ending at 60.

The profile sets those prices beside a cost. A board study of 2015 put the average cost of producing a kilogram of green coffee at 562 francs, ranging from 374 to 755 between regions and farms. In 2015/16 the average robusta price was below that average cost. The profile draws the conclusion itself: falling prices and rising costs explain why the sector has become less and less attractive to growers.

Prices have since risen sharply with the world market. The trade ministry is reported as saying that over the 2024/25 season prices in Cameroon rose from 1,500 to 1,959 francs a kilogram for robusta and from 2,375 to 2,854 for arabica. Those are figures in a newspaper report, which does not say at what point in the chain they were paid, for a different season and not adjusted for a decade of inflation, so they are not put on the same chart as the board's table.

How coffee is drunk in Cameroon

Cameroon drinks little of its own coffee, on its coffee board's account, though more than it did. The board's 2017 profile estimates domestic consumption at 79,000 bags in 2015/16, rising a little each season from 68,000 in 2010/11, and averaging 17 per cent of marketed production over those six seasons. It says plainly that drinking coffee is not a widespread habit. It counts 16 roasters, concentrated in Douala and Nkongsamba, and about 30 brands of roasted or ground coffee on sale, and reports that 3,786 tonnes were roasted in the country in 2015/16, which it puts at eight times the previous season's figure and credits to official campaigns promoting consumption. Not all of that is drunk in Cameroon: the profile says most processed coffee is exported, to Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and beyond. It adds that roasters are exempted from the levies charged on exported green coffee.

All figures are the national board's, for crop years up to 2015/16; the consumption series is labelled an estimate in the profile. Nothing more recent on consumption was read. The eightfold rise in roasting in one season is the profile's own statement and was not checked against anything.

History

Coffee was probably introduced soon after 1884, the year Germany annexed the territory, on the coffee board's account. For four decades it stayed in trial gardens, at Victoria, Ebolowa, Nkongsamba and Dschang. Planting spread in 1925 and 1926 into forest areas, among them Yokadouma, Abong-Mbang and Akonolinga, and trials on the western plateaux succeeded in 1927; the board's history concludes that the best land proved to be those plateaux and the Mungo. It dates the real expansion from 1929 and the arrival of René Coste, a French agricultural engineer, at the Dschang station. Its history page adds that Coste set up a cooperative of Bamoun arabica planters with a water-powered hulling mill near Foumban, and that after independence in 1960 almost all European farms were either transferred to Cameroonians or abandoned. Production then rose, by the board's figures, from about one million bags in 1960 to 1.7 million in 1980 and a peak of 2.2 million in 1986/87. What followed is the subject of two sections below.

Five hundred trees and a register: the rules coffee was planted under

The coffee board's history tells the planting of coffee as a story of trial gardens and an energetic agronomist. A 2017 article in a history journal, drawing on earlier scholarship, describes the terms on which Cameroonians grew it. Under German rule, it says, the administration distributed seed to households and used the existing chiefs to force them to grow it, while limiting a farmer to 500 coffee trees and only where he held a large amount of land, so that coffee would not displace food crops.

Under the French mandate that followed in most of the territory, the same article says, the administration promoted small-scale cash-crop farming in the hope of creating a class of Cameroonians with a stake in French rule. It gives coffee in the western highlands as the example: growers had to register their farms and follow the administrator's regulations, and many who did not were threatened with the destruction of their farms. It reports the argument of the historian it cites that the policy favoured chiefs and notables above all.

Each of these statements is the article's report of another historian's work, which CoffeeHQ has not opened, and the article is a political history in which coffee is one example among several. They are given here because the board's own account is silent on compulsion, and an entry that repeated only the board would be incomplete in a way that matters.

One marketing board, run two ways, and what replaced it

From 1976 coffee was marketed under a single state body, the National Marketing Office for Primary Commodities, known by its French initials as the ONCPB. The coffee board's profile explains that it did not work the same way everywhere. In the French-speaking regions it acted as a stabilisation fund and negotiated contracts on behalf of private exporters; in the English-speaking regions it bought coffee directly through authorised buyers, as a marketing board. Arabica from the West was outside both arrangements: the cooperative union UCCAO held a state-granted monopoly on it. Prices were fixed for growers, and inputs were subsidised.

The profile dates the crisis from 1985, with falling terms of trade and oil prices and new competition from plantations in South-East Asia, and says that supporting the grower's price became impossible. A 2011 thesis on the North-West describes what that meant on the ground: the office fell into debt to the cooperatives, payments to growers were delayed, and in 1989/90 growers received half the guaranteed price. The office was wound up in 1991, and the present board and the interprofessional council were created in its place. By 1994/95 prices were set by the market and export quality control had been privatised.

On the consequences the board is blunt. Its profile lists a lower price to growers and a decline in the quality of exported coffee as the results of liberalisation, and says a significant fall in production followed. The International Coffee Organization's historical table, a separate series from the board's, shows the fall in its own figures: 1,682,000 bags in crop year 1990/91 and 268,000 in 2019/20, where it ends. For the four seasons after the board's profile stops it has 292,000, 370,000, 310,000 and 268,000 bags. The two do not agree where they overlap, 371,000 bags against the board's 269,000 for 2012/13, and CoffeeHQ does not join them. The journal article adds, from the studies it cites, that subsidies had covered four fifths of the price of inputs before the reforms, that fertiliser use fell by more than half afterwards, and that many growers abandoned coffee or turned to other crops. A recovery strategy was drawn up in 2011 and a plan adopted in 2014 with targets for 2020 of 125,000 tonnes of robusta and 35,000 of arabica. The total reported for 2024/25 is less than a tenth of that.

The board that regulates the trade today issued a balance sheet of the previous season when it launched the 2022/23 season at Maroua on 15 March 2023, and it fills the gap after the 2017 profile. It gives the volume traded inside the country, season by season: 24,500 tonnes in 2015/16, 20,270 in 2016/17, 25,315 in 2017/18, 20,495 in 2018/19, 24,691 in 2019/20, then 12,156 in 2020/21 and 11,557 in 2021/22, of which 10,579 tonnes were robusta and 977 arabica. So the halving that the later press reports start from happened between 2019/20 and 2020/21. The brief does not explain it: it says only that the 2021/22 season combined rising prices with a significant drop in the traded volume of robusta. It also counts who was active that season: 51 producer organisations under the board's supervision in eight regions, 126 mills, 28 roasters and 22 exporters, with the Littoral and West regions accounting for most of the robusta bought. These are traded volumes, counted where coffee is sold, and the brief does not say what form of coffee the tonnes are.

Pressures on the sector

• Unmeasured. The board's 2017 profile says it is difficult to assess the effect of climate change on Cameroon's production, and points to a national climate observatory that was to supply the data.
• A poor season put down partly to weather. When marketed production fell by about a quarter in 2023/24, the board is reported to have blamed unfavourable weather together with insecurity in the North-West. The report gives no measurement.
• Scale. Marketed production reported for 2024/25 is under a tenth of the peak of 1986/87, and far below every target set since 2014.
• Old trees. A board survey of 2015 tied falling yields to an ageing tree population; the profile gives yields of 201 kilograms a hectare for arabica and 365 for robusta.
• Finance. The profile says deregulation undermined the cooperatives that had financed production and that the financial system has not found a way to lend to coffee growers; buyers who advance money take the crop as security.
• Insecurity in the North-West, the region that grows only arabica, which the board is reported to have named as a cause of the fall in 2023/24.
• Land. The profile estimates that nine landowners in ten are men, and says women still have difficulty gaining access to land.

No climate study of coffee in Cameroon was read. The first statement is the national board's from 2017; the second is a newspaper's quotation of the board about one season.

Institutions worth knowing

• Office National du Cacao et du Café (ONCC; National Cocoa and Coffee Board) — created in 1991; by its own profile it keeps the statistics of each season, supervises export quality control, approves inspection companies and represents Cameroon at the International Coffee Organization
• Conseil Interprofessionnel du Cacao et du Café (CICC) — the trade's interprofessional council, formed of growers', exporters', processors' and buyers' associations, which the profile says must be consulted on marketing, financing and taxation
• Fonds de Développement des Filières Cacao et Café (FODECC) — the sector development fund that receives the largest of the three levies charged on each kilogram of green coffee exported
• Institut de Recherche Agricole pour le Développement (IRAD) — the national agricultural research institute, named by the profile for coffee research and by a 2019 paper as the partner in field work on coffee berry disease
• Union Centrale des Coopératives Agricoles de l'Ouest (UCCAO) — the cooperative union that held a state monopoly on arabica from the West until liberalisation, and still exports and roasts
• North-West Cooperative Association (NWCA) — the cooperative of the English-speaking arabica region, reported as shipping about half of the country's arabica exports in 2023/24

Explore Cameroon's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1RobustaThe species that makes up about nine tenths of what Cameroon markets, and how it differs from arabica as a plant.
2. Step 2JavaThe variety selected in Cameroon for its partial tolerance of coffee berry disease, with the catalogue's account of where it came from.
3. Step 3Coffee pests and diseasesWhat coffee berry disease and the berry borer are, and why a disease confined to one continent shapes breeding on others.
4. Step 4Coffee economics and price formationHow an export price becomes a farm price, which is the calculation Cameroon's board publishes for six seasons.
5. Step 5Washed processingThe method used for Cameroon's arabica, and why pulping on the day of picking matters to it.
6. Step 6UgandaAnother African origin that is mostly robusta with highland arabica beside it, whose production went the other way.
7. Step 7TanzaniaAnother African origin that grows both species; compare how its entry describes each being processed and sold.