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DEVELOPMENT: Cameroon Adds Famine to Its List of Woes
By Sylvestre Tetchiada
YAOUNDE, Oct 8 (IPS) - As a result of two decades of decreasing economic
activities, Cameroon is now in a serious financial crisis that is
threatening the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Cameroon has committed itself to the MDGs, adopted in September 2000 by
189 world leaders, to halve poverty by 2015.
The economic crisis has forced Cameroon to reduce public investment and
increase borrowing from international financial institutions.
Cameroon is relatively rich. It has considerable reserves of petroleum,
wood, cocoa, coffee, aluminum, sugar cane, bauxite, rubber, natural gas,
iron and hydroelectric potential.
Under the staggering weight of its debt, Cameroon's economy is
stagnating. In 20 years, the country's debt has risen from 2.9 billion
dollars in 1983 to 8.5 billion in 2004, according to official figures.
Now Cameroon can add famine to its list of woes, especially in its
southern provinces where nearly two-fifths of the country's 16.5 million
people live.
''About 250,000 people are affected by the famine in the extreme north,
one of the country's poorest regions, and more than a million need emergency
aid,'' Justin Bagirishya, the country's regional director of the World Food
Programme (WFP), told IPS. ''In October, the WFP will provide emergency
rations to the needy.''
''The recurrence, since nearly ten years ago, of food insecurity in this
part of the world makes the realisation of MDGs a hypothetical enterprise,''
said Germaine Bitanga, an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Cameroon's Extreme North province is situated in the Sahel, some 1,000
kilometres from the capital, Yaounde. The province is vulnerable to natural
disasters such as floods in the rainy season and long droughts, which
sometimes last nine months of the year.
In 2004, the province experienced little rain which led to a
200,000-tonne drop in production, compared with the previous year's 7.45
million tonnes, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
The province produces corn, sorghum, rice, cassava (manioc), sweet
potatoes, yams, plantains, beans, vegetables and tomatoes. But a large chunk
of the production is exported to neighbouring countries such as Gabon and
Equatorial Guinea.
The WFP, with an 880,000-dollar grant from France, began delivering
relief aid to the province's nine districts on Sep. 24.
However, the aid will not cover the entire relief operation, which will
last a month and cost two million dollars, the WFP said.
The UN's eight steps of eradicating poverty, which are to be realised by
2015, includes the reduction of famine. In 2005, according to the WFP, more
than 1.2 billion people in the world live on less than a dollar a day and
800 million still suffer from hunger.
Economists fear that foreign debt will further complicate Cameroon's
efforts to attain MDGs. ''In two decades, the foreign debt of our country
has gone from 2.9 billion dollars in 1983 to just under 10 billion in
2005,'' Francois Colin Nkoa, a lecturer at the University of Yaounde II's
School of Economics and Management, told IPS.
''Unfortunately'', he said, ''development did not keep pace and the
country became mired even more in the twists and turns of poverty without
anyone really knowing what all the borrowed money was spent on.''
''Cameroon has always received large amounts of aid,'' Jacques Hiol, a
Yaounde-based attorney, told IPS. ''But it seems that the aid has
contributed more to slowing down the country's growth and demoting it from
an intermediate-income country to a Heavily Indebted and Poor Country
(HIPC).''
Contacted by telephone, an official at the Ministry of Finance, who
wished to remain anonymous, denied Hiol's claims. According to him, the
money borrowed was used to fund development projects such as the
Yaounde-Douala highway in the 1980s, an international airport, schools, and
several hospitals in Yaounde and Douala, the country's financial capital.
According to a 2005 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report,
about 50 percent of Cameroonians live below the poverty line on less than a
dollar a day.
Analyses of Cameroon's economy contained in the document ''National
Accounts 1992-2003'', presented by the National Institute of Statistics in
Yaounde in August, paint a bleak picture of the country's economic outlook.
It shows that due to some regions' vulnerability to natural catastrophe,
Cameroon will neither be able to halve the number of its citizens living
below the poverty line nor provide health care to women, girls, or children.
''The untenable burden of debt servicing and the inability of the HIPC
initiative to resolve this problem only add to the impoverishment of
Cameroon's people,'' said Jeanne d'Arc Teumo, the president of the
Integrated Programme Against Poverty, a non-governmental organisation based
in Yaounde. ''If nothing is done, we will not be able to eliminate poverty
until 2150.''
Cameroon is supposed to benefit from the HIPC programme, launched by the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 1996. The programme
consists of total or partial debt cancellation from the multilateral
financial institutions.
Unfortunately, critics say the initiative has not produced the desired
results, due to the stringent conditions attached to it.
As a result, civil societies have called on the government to demonstrate
greater incisiveness in fighting corruption and making the justice system
more independent so that it can track and prosecute senior officials accused
of embezzlement.
''Our strategy is to improve governance, fight corruption, strengthen
democracy and pursue appropriate development policies and programmes,''
Frederic Nyambi, a Ministry of Planning official, told IPS.
A new hope, however, is on the horizon. Cameroon is one of 20 countries
in Africa and Asia cited as soon-to-be potential debt relief beneficiaries
at the Group of Eight (G-8) Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in June, and
confirmed in September at the World Bank and IMF general assemblies.
(END/2005)
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