@untoldafrica68: Replying to @jeh2161o In the 1980s Cameroon was the 8th largest coffee producer in the world and the 2nd largest in Africa. 🌍🇨🇲 The ONCPB guaranteed minimum prices to every farmer — absorbing international market shocks so that when London commodity prices crashed the Cameroonian farmer still got paid. Then in 1991 the IMF called it inefficient. Structural adjustment dissolved it. The guaranteed prices disappeared. The fertiliser subsidies disappeared. Farmers were left to sell their entire harvest on the spot market at the lowest price of the year with no information and no leverage. By 2014 production had collapsed from 132,000 tonnes to 22,000. An 84 percent fall. Cameroon dropped from 8th in the world to 30th. The European companies kept buying. The chocolate kept selling at full price. The farmers who grew it could not afford fertiliser. That is not a market. That is extraction with paperwork. #AfricaUntold #UntoldAfrica #CameroonCoffee #CameroonHistory #StructuralAdjustment
