Crisis and Neoliberal Reforms in Africa: Civil Society and Agro-Industry in Anglophone Cameroon�s Plantation Economy

1. Civil society and Anglophone Cameroon’s agro-industrial crisis and reforms

1 1 Civil society and Anglophone Cameroon’s agro-industrial crisis and reforms Introduction Anglophone Cameroon is somewhat exceptional in the West and Central African region in the sense that a plantation economy was established there during the German colonial era (1884-1916) and has remained as a dominant feature of the regional economy ever since. Two agro-industrial enterprises have dominated the plantation sector: one is a huge parastatal enterprise, the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), and the other is a private company, Plantations Pamol du Cameroun Ltd, or Pamol as it is popularly known, a subsidiary of Unilever. Most of the estates are located in the present South West Province of Anglophone Cameroon. Since 1977, however, the CDC has extended its activities beyond the South West Province to other provinces by creating four additional estates. It took over the Ndu Tea Estate from a Lipton subsidiary, Estates and Agency Company Ltd, in the Anglophone North West Province, and acquired land to set up three new estates in the Francophone area, namely the Kompina and Penda Mboko Rubber Estates in the Littoral Province and the Djuttitsa Tea Estate near Dschang in the West Province. The acquisition of these new estates demonstrated not only the Cameroonian government’s persistent faith in the CDC management and its development potential but also its intention to transform the corporation from a regional into a national agro-industrial enterprise. There are different theories on plantation agriculture but all seem to agree that this form of production is more likely to meet the imperatives of increased agricultural output and capital accumulation than smallholder production can. Existing studies on the CDC and Pamol mostly maintain that such agro-industrial 2 Crisis and Neoliberal Reforms in Africa enterprises have contributed greatly to regional development. They are seen as the lifeline of the Anglophone region in general, and the South West Province in particular. The economic and financial crisis that befell the Cameroonian agro-industrial sector in the 1980s has however brought both companies to the verge of collapse. This crisis, which caused great commotion in Anglophone Cameroon, presented a serious challenge to existing theories on plantation production and capital accumulation and led to the implementation of a number of neoliberal economic reforms in an attempt to revive Anglophone Cameroon’s ailing plantation economy and set it on the road to renewed capital accumulation. Such reform measures included the withdrawal of state intervention and state subsidies from the regional agro-industrial sector and the restructuring, liquidation and privatisation of existing agro-industrial enterprises with a view to enhancing their efficiency, cost effectiveness and international competitiveness as well as to attracting foreign investment. The Cameroonian state refused to assist Pamol during its deep crisis and, as a result, the company was put into voluntary liquidation in October 1987 and has been up for sale ever since. The CDC was first denied public grants and subsidies, then restructured, and set for privatisation in 1994. The neoliberal reform measures had severe consequences for civil-society groups that had a direct stake in these agro-industrial enterprises, notably the ethno-regional elite and their associations, regional chiefs and their organisations, plantation workers and their trade unions, and contract farmers and their cooperatives. This study shows that these civil-society groups have never resigned themselves to their fate but have been actively involved in a variety of formal and informal methods of resistance. In this connection, it is important to observe that the introduction of various neoliberal political reforms in the early 1990s, as in other African states, created more political space for civil-society organisations (Bratton 1989, 1994; van de Walle 1993; Konings 2009b). Following political liberalisation, several associations of the regional elite and chiefs emerged (Nyamnjoh & Rowlands 1998), and older organisations like trade unions and smallholder cooperatives regained a large measure of autonomy, allowing them to represent their members’ interests more effectively against management and the state. 3 Chapter 1: Civil society and Anglophone Cameroon’s agro-industrial crisis and reforms In the first section of this introductory chapter, I discuss some of the major theories on plantation production that have influenced previous studies on the CDC and Pamol. In the second section, I first show how the regional agro-industrial crisis and reforms have seriously threatened the interests of various civil-society groups and organisations and then introduce the prominent ones. Major theories on plantation production A review of...