Africa Edition
State agribusiness company CDC exported 15,402 tons of bananas between January and November 2021. Still, in the same period in 2017, the year when the sociopolitical crisis that destroyed the economic fabric of the Southwest escalated, the company exported 90,988 tons of bananas.
This means that comparatively, between January and November 2017, CDC’s banana exports were 5.9 times greater than the volume it exported over the same period this year. This fact reveals the challenges being faced by the agribusiness firm to bounce back after the so-called Anglophone crisis raging in the Northwest and Southwest since late 2016.
CDC is the second-largest employer in Cameroon after the civil service. Under the guise of separatist claims, armed individuals converted its plantations into training grounds. The staff found that those plantations were usually attacked while the processing, storage, and packaging infrastructure were burnt.
The insecure environment in which the company and its 22,000 employees were operating forced the management to suspend operations. This led to CDC’s disappearance from the banana exporters’ database between September 2018 and May 2020.
Source: businessincameroon.com
