Crop production within the municipality

More than 90% of the people of the Ndu municipality currently depend on agriculture for living.
Generally, the variation of soil types together with the climatic distinctions favour the cultivation
of a large variety of crops, ranging from low-altitude crops like oil palm and rice to high-altitude
crops like Irish potato. It must be noted here that soils gradually lose their fertility due to
over-exploitation and slash-and-burn agriculture. However, crops are cultivated for cash or
subsistence.
The common crops grown include tea, oil palm, coffee, rice, maize, beans, potato, yam, plantain,
banana, garden crops, and various fruits. Various agricultural production systems are
employed including fallowing, mixed cropping, mono-cropping, continuous cropping, and
plantation farming. An agro-industrial firm; Cameroon Tea Estate exists in the municipality
which is a tea plantation.

Some food crops

From the table, total crop production is generally on the increase. However, farmers could
produce more, but they continue to face production constraints. Some problems encountered by
farmers include:

• The difficulty of evacuating farm produce from the hinterlands to market centers due to the
• absence of farm-to-market roads.
• The high cost of inputs necessary to step up production
• Poor soil fertility in some areas of the municipality
• The lack of storage facilities whenever there is high production and low sales
• The problem of pests and diseases
• The absence of financial institutions to grant loans for micro projects
• Insufficient agricultural field staff who work under deplorable conditions.

As a result of the above problems, subsistence farming is predominant within the Ndu
municipality. Such farming is not market-orientated. Consequently, production per unit area is
low. When one considers the declining soil fertility, poor farm maintenance and the lack of
markets in the hinterlands, the problems can be daunting for the farmer. These problems are
exacerbated as farmers plant several crops on a single piece of land. Furthermore, they own
many pieces of farms in different locations, some as many as ten kilometers or more away from
each other. This involves the farmer wasting time walking between the farms to cultivate a few
crops.

Main cash crops

The major cash crop produced in the municipality is coffee. Though the forces of demand and
supply are supposed to determine the price, this does not happen. This is because there are fewer
buyers than thousands of sellers, and there is price collusion by buyers. The result is too little
money offered for coffee. Every indication is that the buyers will continue to extort the farmers
since most of the farmers come from the hinterlands and lack storage facilities, roads and
vehicles to carry coffee back home. So, they are always going to be forced to sell their coffee at
giveaway prices. More so, the farmers are ignorant of the idea of creating a farmer’s union to
improve upon their bargaining power

Farmers are encouraged to produce in the following ways:

• The acquisition and planting of improved maize variety
• At the end of every year, the Council in collaboration with the Delegation of Agriculture,
• rewards hard-working farmers and stimulates the spirit of competitiveness among them
• The exposure of farming groups to technical recommendations on post-harvest loss
• reduction.
• Young farmer competitions and award of grants (as a yearly activity). In these competitions,
• young farmers are encouraged to invest in farming after receiving farm inputs.

All the above-mentioned activities involve land preparation, seed selection, planting,
maintenance operation, harvesting, transportation, processing in some cases, storage, home
consumption and marketing.
The solution may be for the farmers to divert from their dependence on one crop or look for
other ways of using the coffee themselves, such as the introduction of industries that may need
coffee as its main raw material. They may also look for markets elsewhere or create a coffee
distribution cooperative.
If any of the above is to be done, the farmers’ dependence on existing local coffee species whose
production per unit area is lower than that of the improved coffee must be examined
appropriately. This means they must galvanise time, energy and money towards more
productive coffee seedlings