Cover_Rebuilding West Africas Food Potential

118 Rebuilding West Africa’s food potential

up better structures to participate in managing selected sectors with more equitable distribution of

the added value in each sector?

Which mechanisms and tools are available to small producers and their organizations to bring

about new synergies between the private and the public sectors to manage major constraints such

as input supply and access to market?

This study is based on two sources of information. First, a literature review consisting in a synthesis

of existing documents and analytical reports on policies’ effectiveness as well as consultations with

various stakeholders and organizations that have contributed to its development. Second, primary

data were collected from different categories of stakeholders including farmer organization members

of commodity sectors. In-depth surveys of eighty farmer organizations in several sectors have been

conducted, including cooperatives / grassroots Common Interest Groups (CIGs), regional unions and

federations, private sector operators, technical and financial partners, as well as public project and

programs managers and ministry officials in Cameroon. One of this survey’s objectives is to identify

possible bottlenecks in these sectors and to identify links with policies that have been implemented.

The primary data from surveys of stakeholders have been processed, coded and entered using SPSS

12.0 software to design the input mask (input interface) from the interview guides and statistical

processing of data (descriptive statistics) and Excel 2007 to process the tables for further analysis.

2. Inventory of national policies in the CEMAC area

2.1 Overview of the agricultural sector in the CEMAC zone

The CEMAC zone, which covers six countries, namely Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea,

Chad and the Central African Republic, lies between the 24th north latitude degree and the fifth

south latitude degree, and between the 8th and 28th longitude degrees. It covers a total area of more

than 3 million km2, with 1.24 million km2 for Chad alone. Thanks to its geographical location, the

CEMAC zone benefits from a diversity of agro-ecological zones that can be grouped into five main types

summarized in the following table: