Yaounde, Oct 9 - Cameroon will spend 25 billion CFA francs ($56.21 million) to draw subsistence farmers back into the coffee industry with an eye toward tripling output by 2015, the government said Friday.
The plan seeks to take advantage of strong world demand for beans and would bring Cameroon output back near its peak coffee production levels hit in the mid-1980s when the West African nation was the world's 12th biggest supplier.
"The strategy... aims to shift us from a subsistence system to one that is professional and durable, economically beneficial to all, and places Cameroon back on the international market," said Trade Minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana.
Many Cameroon farmers abandoned the coffee industry for food crops in the mid-1990s due to a drop in world prices, slashing the country's production from a 1996 high of 132,000 tonnes per year to last year's 43,000 tonnes.
Cameroon's coffee revamp plans to raise output to around 125,000 tonnes by rehabilitating old plantations and building new ones, improving roads to market, providing farmers with better varieties and lower input costs, creating farmers cooperatives, and setting up a market information system, Atangana said.
Some 80 percent of the crop will be robusta, with the rest arabica, and at least 80,000 tonnes would go straight into the export market, he said.
Some 6 billion CFA ($13.49 million) of the investment would come from partners including the World Bank, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC).
"World demand for coffee is expected to stand at 145-150 million bags in 2015 as against 130 million bags in 2008, representing an increase of 15-20 million bags or 11-15 percent," said Michael Ndoping, general manager of Cameroon's Cocoa and Coffee Board.
"All producing nations are putting in place strategies to make maximum gain from the expected windfall and Cameroon cannot be left behind, especially given the advantage that we produce both arabica and robusta coffee," he said.
Before the collapse of the sector in the mid-1990s, coffee and cocoa constituted the backbone of the Cameroon economy.
Cameroon currently exports its robusta coffee to Italy, Belgium, Portugual and France, and its arabica coffee to Germany, the United States, Italy and Belgium. ($1=444.8 Cfa Franc)