Price Rises

One of the most important things to happen this year is the incredible rise in food prices.  It's been noted that if affects the poorest the most, mainly because the little income that people make is used almost exclusively for food.  I thought you might be curious to see how this has increased food prices and other products in Lagdo.

 

Corn

 

A sack of corn, 100 kilograms (200 pounds), in the summer of 2007 was 14.000 cfa.  The price is at its highest because it's the planting season, so food stocks have reached their lowest.  After the harvest, in the winter (these are temperate climate seasons I'm using) the price dropped to 8.000 cfa.  Now this year, during the planting season, a sack of corn is 22.000 cfa, an increase of 57% from last year at the same time, if my calculations are correct.

 

Diamor Cooking Oil

 

The major cooking oil people in the Grand North of Cameroon use is cottonseed oil produced by SODECOTON, the Cameroonian cotton company, called Diamor.  When I got to Cameroon in late 2006, two years ago exactly, Diamor, sold in one-liter bottles, cost about 700 cfa.  Two years later, the price in Lagdo is now sold for 1400 a bottle.  The price has gone up so much that all of the boutique owners in Lagdo have switched to a couple brands of cooking oil from Douala, palm and vegetable oils.  Still, those new brands cost 1.300 for a liter.

 

I don't really miss Diamor.  I despised it, actually.  It's pretty gross, a really thick concoction that claims to be "cholesterol free" on the bottle.  Furthermore, it's produced by Sodecoton, a disliked entity in Cameroonian life.  If there's something you don't want to be when you grow up, it's a small-time cotton farmer.  You're going to get fucked no matter what you do.

 

Fertilizer

 

I'm not sure how much fertilizer cost last year, but this year it's just too much.  A big sack of fertilizer in Lagdo cost 22.000 cfa, about the same price as corn; and given that you need a steady supply of fertilizer throughout the growing season, you'd have to sell several sacks of corn to break even.  Cotton growers working with Sodecoton receive some fertilizer for free (I'm assuming it's free), but given how rare and in demand fertilizer is around here, you can find the cotton farmers selling it at the market, not exactly helping an already weak crop. 

 

The importance of fertilizer can't be understated.  In addition to selling it out of his boutique, Yotti started using it in his cornfields, and the stalks shot up like a rocket since the picture I took in an earlier post in July or August.

 

Cement

 

According to the September 13 Jeune Afrique, a really good Francophone Africa news magazine, the price of cement in Cameroon is a little complicated.  On one hand, prices need to rise because of the increased demand in Cameroon and neighboring countries and the increase in the cost of primary materials and oil, but on the other, the government is keeping the price artificially low, which is hindering the leading cement producer, Cimencam, from increasing production to meet said demand.  JA says that the government is keeping the price low because it wants to keep construction prices down, but they also don't want people to take to the streets like they did in February.  (I believe the government is also subsidizing gas prices, which sparked the riots to begin with, because the price hasn't changed at all in the last seven months.)

 

As for concrete prices (sorry for the pun… but I'm really not) in Lagdo, it's gone up about 15-20% the last year.  For a 50 kg sack nowadays, you have to dole out 7500 cfa.

 

(Factoids: Cinencam is actually owned by a French company and has factories throughout the country.  There's one in the North province in Figuil, a town about 90 minutes/two hours north of Garoua on the highway.  Also, a Korean company is going to open a new cement factory in Limbé, which is probably causing the Cimencam folks to wonder when they're going to catch a break: while the government is screwing them, they're letting a competitor in on a growing market so they can rake in the foreign investment.)