Cameroon's economy: the farms carry it and oil sits at the margin

How little of Cameroon's output oil now makes

Cameroon became an oil producer in 1977, when what the Bertelsmann Transformation Index calls modest offshore deposits came into production. Under Ahmadou Ahidjo the revenue paid for a national cash reserve, payments to farmers and large development projects, many of which failed after he put unqualified allies in charge of them. The money itself was kept off the budget. The authorities said they were saving it for difficult times, the funds sat in accounts in Paris, Switzerland and New York, and their management has been described as wholly opaque.

Forty-eight years on, the sector is small and shrinking. The IMF's tables for its March 2026 Article IV consultation put oil output at 1,017 billion CFA francs in 2024 and 834 billion in 2025, against total output of 32,316 billion and 34,445 billion. Oil GDP contracted 9.7% in 2024 and 7.2% in 2025 while the non-oil economy grew 3.8% and 3.3%. The African Development Bank traces an 8.82% fall in oil production in 2025 to a lack of new investment projects.

The revenue line is where two sources part company. The BTI 2026 country report says government revenue "relies predominantly on the oil sector, with very few non-oil sectors contributing". The IMF's table for 2025 puts oil revenue at 1.6% of GDP and non-oil revenue at 12.3%. Neither document addresses the other's figure. What the Fund's numbers do show is that cocoa now moves the external account too: it expects the current account deficit to widen to 5.3% of GDP in 2026 "on the back of lower cocoa prices".

Oil still shapes the edges of the economy. The Bakassi peninsula, awarded to Cameroon by the International Court of Justice in 2002 and handed over by Nigeria in two stages in 2006 and 2008, is described as oil-rich. The national refinery, SONARA, stands in the Southwest Region. Fuel prices are administered, so a rise in the world price lifts oil revenue and the subsidy bill together, and in March 2026 the IMF asked for an automatic fuel pricing mechanism. In February 2008 a transport workers' strike against high fuel prices grew into unrest across the major cities.

What Cameroon's farms grow and who works them

Some nine-tenths of the working population farmed in the 1970s and slightly more than half did three decades later, according to Britannica. The World Bank's current overview puts the share at nearly 60%. Farming's share of output is far smaller, estimated at 16.7% of GDP in 2017. Most of it is smallholding with simple tools. Farmers sell their surplus, some keep a separate field for cash crops, and the towns buy their food from them. Britannica describes the country as generally self-sufficient in food, with production keeping pace with population growth.

The Adamawa Plateau crosses the country and divides its farming in two. South of it the food crops are plantains, beans, yams, cassava, maize and oil palm; north of it, groundnuts, millet and cassava again. The coastal soils carry commercial bananas, cocoa, oil palms, rubber and tea, and the volcanic soils around Mount Cameroon are especially fertile. Coffee is the cash crop of the western highlands, where arabica grows alongside the robusta that makes up most of the harvest. Cotton, introduced in 1952, is grown by private farmers in the northern grasslands, and Fairtrade cotton production began in 2004.

Cocoa is grown mainly in the south, small-scale farms produce much of the country's agricultural exports, and Britannica records that ageing plantations and slow modernisation have held yields down. In December 2014 the United States Bureau of International Labor Affairs listed Cameroon among the countries using child labour in cocoa production.

Livestock is exported to Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo, and hides and skins go to Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. The sea gives less. Fisheries are held back by a short stretch of exploitable water carrying relatively few fish, and industrial fishing lands only a fraction of the catch.

Forest covered about 43% of the land in 2020, some 20.3 million hectares against 22.5 million in 1990. Sawn wood earns more than a tenth of export revenue, and only about a third of the hardwood resource is worked, mostly along the Douala to Yaoundé railway and the main roads. The BTI 2026 report puts deforestation at about 1% a year over the past decade, driven by palm oil, mining and road building.

How German plantations became the Southwest's estates

The plantation belt is older than the state. The Hamburg firm C. Woermann opened a trading post in the Duala area in 1868, and the trading houses that followed obtained land from local chiefs and began planting, bananas among them. Germany declared the colony of Kamerun in 1884, and the companies that ran it grew bananas, rubber, palm oil and cocoa with forced labour. Under Governor Puttkamer the plantations had more fields than workers, and the shortfall was met with levies of men and with captives taken in newly conquered country.

Partition in 1916 split the estates between two administrations with opposite instincts. France declined to return much of the German property in its share and reassigned it to French companies; the Société financière des Caoutchoucs took over plantations started under German rule. Britain put the estates in its share up for auction in London, meaning to pay the proceeds into a war reparations account, found few bidders, and sold most of them back to their German owners. Former owners went on buying their plantations back through the 1920s and 1930s, and most of the white population of the British territory in the 1930s was still German, interned from June 1940.

On the French side, from the 1940s, the colonial authorities pushed coffee in the west, cotton in the north and cocoa in the south. The Douala to Yaoundé railway, begun under German rule, was finished by the French administration with forced labour working fifty-four hours a week.

The Southwest's large plantations now belong to the Cameroon Development Corporation, a state company that had 22,000 employees in 2018. Its history runs through the country's politics. On 8 August 1961, weeks before reunification, armed men entered the corporation's camp at Ebudu near Tombel and killed twelve of its workers, and the corporation housed a powerful lobby against joining the French-speaking republic. In 1994, under pressure from the IMF, the government announced its privatisation, and English-speaking Cameroonians protested against it, because the company carried a large share of the economic and social life of their regions.

What the Anglophone conflict cost the plantations

Protests by lawyers, teachers and students in the Northwest and Southwest from October 2016 turned into an armed conflict between separatist groups and government forces from 2017. The International Crisis Group, writing on 2 August 2017, said no serious economic study of the crisis had been published. It put the two regions' contribution at around 20% of GDP, citing the national statistics institute's 2016 breakdown, and named the Southwest the motor of the local economy because of its timber, the plantations and oil industries. Cutting the internet in the two regions had already paralysed banking and microfinance there, at a direct cost several estimates put at 2 billion CFA francs, about €3 million, by 2017.

The figures that followed came from the companies and from local monitors. In June 2018 the Cameroon Development Corporation said the conflict could cost 5,000 jobs in the short term. In July 2018 the Cameroonian organisation Human Is Right reported a 70% rise in agricultural unemployment, the state company Pamol had abandoned plantations in some areas, and the private firm Telcar Cocoa reported cocoa output down 80%. The same organisation suggested that companies make deals with the separatists to protect their facilities.

The state's income from the two regions went with them. Annual tax revenue there fell from US$800,000 to US$1,000 by 2019, and by 2020 almost all tax officials had left their posts on the Nigerian border. Separatist strategy was to make holding the regions cost the state more than they returned. Nigerian traders who had run key markets left too.

Crisis Group recorded in 2017 that the crisis had reached every sector of the regional economy except hydrocarbons and forestry. The oil installations and timber concessions kept working; the plantations and cocoa farms took the losses. The BTI 2026 report still lists the palm oil industry as suffering from the conflict, and the World Bank counts more than one million people internally displaced by it and by Boko Haram's attacks in the Far North since September 2017.

Why the slump of the eighties lasted so long

For about two decades after independence the economy grew on cash crops and, from 1977, oil. The government spent on schools, farm diversification, selective industry and rural cooperatives, and leaned less on planning as the years went on. African Affairs magazine reported in the early 1980s that French nationals controlled 55% of the modern sector of the economy.

Prices broke in the mid-1980s. Petroleum, cocoa, coffee and cotton fell together, the currency was overvalued, and the economy was mismanaged. Real income per head fell by more than 60% between 1986 and 1994. Cameroon signed a structural adjustment loan in 1989 that included bank reform, privatisation, trade liberalisation and budget restraint, but no monetary measures, because the exchange rate was set for the whole franc zone.

The government failed to meet the conditions of the first four IMF programmes. It cut civil service salaries by 65% in 1993, and in January 1994 the CFA franc was devalued by 50%, for Cameroon and 13 other African states at once. The fifth programme, an Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility approved in August 1997, was still on track in March 1998. It required the privatisation of most of the nearly 100 remaining non-financial state enterprises and an end to marketing board monopolies on cocoa, some coffees and cotton. The Paris Club debt was rescheduled and growth ran at about 5% a year from 1995.

Debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative cut the burden further. Public debt fell from over 60% of GDP to 10% between 2004 and 2008, and official reserves quadrupled to more than US$3 billion. Afterwards the government came to rely on non-concessional loans for large infrastructure projects. The World Bank links a second, slower change to the devaluation: labour leaving farms for low-productivity urban services, which have been the main source of growth ever since.

Where Cameroon's money is lent and held

The formal economy sits in two cities. More than 75% of the country's industrial capacity is in Douala and Bonabéri, and Yaoundé and Douala generate about 90% of all bank credit and deposits. The BTI 2026 report counts 15 commercial banks and more than 400 microfinance institutions, with the four largest banks holding nearly two thirds of bank assets.

Access thins out quickly beyond those cities, and the sources differ on how far. The BTI report puts the share of Cameroonians with formal banking access below 20%; the Wikipedia economy article gives around 25% with a bank account in 2024. Mobile money reaches more people, though a tax on electronic transfers introduced in 2022 may have narrowed it. Outside the banks, community savings groups known as tontines are common.

Credit to the economy was 17.5% of GDP in 2025, against 31% in Senegal by the African Development Bank's comparison. Bank loans to small firms are capped at 15% interest and heavily taxed, which pushes lenders toward large established companies. Non-performing loans stood at 14.9% of the total in June 2025, and the IMF has warned of a sovereign-bank nexus as banks lend more to the state and to regional state enterprises. Cameroon is on the Financial Action Task Force grey list, and the IMF called in March 2026 for faster anti-money-laundering reform to get it off.

The state's own reach is wide and its tax take is thin. More than 130 state-owned enterprises operate, among them SONARA, the sugar company CAMSUCO, the palm oil company SOCAPALM, the cotton company SODECOTON and CAMTEL in telecommunications, and the BTI report estimates their undisclosed debt at about 12.5% of GDP. Tax revenue was 13.3% of GDP in 2025, against a floor of 17%. The informal sector was estimated at 49.2% of GDP in 2025, and the BTI report says nearly 90% of the population works in it. Only 2% of land is registered, and the BTI 2026 report counts fewer than 1,000 titles issued a year.

How goods leave through Douala and Kribi

Douala on the Wouri River is the main seaport, and its delays are a recurring complaint. The BTI 2026 report blames complex bureaucracy there for long waits and high costs, and every cargo shipped to a Cameroonian port needs an electronic tracking note, the BESC, issued by the national shippers' council. In 2026 a crisis in container scanning at Douala was expected to hold down government revenue enough to widen the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP.

The deepwater port at Kribi began operating in 2014. Container traffic at its new wharf rose 333.3% in 2025, one of the items the African Development Bank lists behind that year's non-oil growth. Power came with it: the Nachtigal dam added 420 megawatts in 2025. Hydropower made up 71% of electricity generation in 2022, with the Sanaga River driving the station at Edéa, and much of the country still lacks a reliable supply.

Inland, movement is slower. Most roads are untarred, and roadblocks on them often serve to collect bribes from travellers. The railway runs from Kumba in the west to Bélabo in the east and north to Ngaoundéré.

The trade rules changed in two directions within four years. An Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union took effect in 2016, giving most Cameroonian goods duty-free entry to Europe in return for lower tariffs on European imports. In 2020 Cameroon lost its eligibility for preferences under the United States African Growth and Opportunity Act over human rights violations. Its main export markets include the Netherlands, France, China, Belgium, Italy, Algeria and Malaysia.

Why the lenders disagree about the same year

Three institutions published estimates for 2025 within months of each other, and no two match.

The IMF gives a reason for its lower figure: election-related disruption in October and November 2025 hit trade, services and investment, and growth came in slower than it had forecast. The deficit measures differ in definition as well as in date: the IMF's 2.0% is the overall balance including grants on a payment-order basis, and on a cash basis its table shows 1.0%. On one point the three converge. Each records Cameroon at high risk of debt distress, and the World Bank and the African Development Bank both still call the debt sustainable.

The social figures diverge further, mostly because they count different things. The African Development Bank put poverty at 37.7% in 2022. The World Bank says about four in ten Cameroonians live below the national poverty line and puts 23.0% below the extreme international line on the 2021 to 2022 household survey. The BTI report gives a poverty rate of 46.7% for 2021. Unemployment is the starkest case: 3.38% in 2019 on one estimate, around 3.9% officially by the BTI's account, and 9.8% projected for 2025 by the African Development Bank. With nearly nine workers in ten outside the formal economy, the BTI report judges the official rate of limited significance.

For 2026 the forecasts again fan out: the IMF expects 3.3% growth, the African Development Bank 4.0%, and the World Bank an average of 3.7% over 2026 to 2028. The IMF's medium-term path reaches 4.6% as mining investments come in. The country those forecasts describe had 28,372,687 people as of 2023.