Cameroon: Poverty abounds in land rich in natural resources.

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Author: Tetchiada, Sylvestre

Dateline: YAOUNDE, Oct. 8, 2005 (IPS/GIN) â€"

Drought, famine and ballooning foreign debt may mean Cameroon will be unable to meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), despite international promises of debt relief.

Cameroon is relatively rich. It has considerable reserves of petroleum, wood, cocoa, coffee, aluminum, sugar cane, bauxite, rubber, natural gas, iron and hydroelectric potential.

But Cameroon's economy is stagnating under the staggering weight of its debt. The country's debt has risen from $2.9 billion in 1983 to $8.5 billion in 2004, according to official figures.

Cameroon is considered a Heavily Indebted and Poor Country (HIPC), and is one of 20 countries in Africa and Asia that will have their debt forgiven by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund under a program championed by the Group of Eight (G-8) most industrialized nations.

The impact of the pending debt relief in Cameroon and its efforts to meet the poverty-reducing MDGs is unclear. According to a 2005 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report, about 50 percent of Cameroonians live in extreme poverty on less than a dollar a day.

The National Institute of Statistics in Yaounde reported in August some regions' vulnerability to natural catastrophe means Cameroon will neither be able to halve the number of its citizens living below the poverty line nor provide health care to women, girls, or children. Both are goals the country agreed to meet by 2015 under the MDGs.

"The untenable burden of debt servicing and the inability of the HIPC initiative to resolve this problem only add to the impoverishment of Cameroon's people," said Jeanne d'Arc Teumo, the president of the Integrated Program Against Poverty, a non-governmental organization based in Yaounde. "If nothing is done, we will not be able to eliminate poverty until 2150." Now Cameroon can add famine to its list of woes, especially in its southern provinces where nearly two-fifths of the country's 16.5 million people live. The MDGs also call for reducing famine.

"About 250,000 people are affected by the famine in the Extreme North, one of the country's poorest regions, and more than a million need emergency aid," Justin Bagirishya, the country's regional director of the World Food Program (WFP), told IPS.

"The recurrence, since nearly 10 years ago, of food insecurity in this part of the world makes the realization of MDGs a hypothetical enterprise," said Germaine Bitanga, an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Cameroon's Extreme North province is situated in the Sahel, some 1,000 kilometers from the capital, Yaounde. The province is vulnerable to natural disasters such as floods in the rainy season and long droughts, which sometimes last nine months of the year.

In 2004, drought in the province led to a 200,000-ton drop in production, compared with the previous year's 7.45 million tons, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The province produces corn, sorghum, rice, cassava (manioc), sweet potatoes, yams, plantains, beans, vegetables and tomatoes. But a large chunk of the production is exported to neighboring countries such as Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

The WFP, with an $880,000 grant from France, began delivering relief aid to the province's nine districts Sept. 24.

However, the aid will not cover the entire relief operation, which will last a month and cost $2 million, the WFP said.

Heavy foreign debt also played a role in the country's economic crisis. By this year, foreign debt was nearly $10 billion, Francois Colin Nkoa, a lecturer at the University of Yaounde II's School of Economics and Management, told IPS.

"Unfortunately," he said, "development did not keep pace and the country became mired even more in the twists and turns of poverty without anyone really knowing what all the borrowed money was spent on."

"Cameroon has always received large amounts of aid," Jacques Hiol, a Yaounde-based attorney, told IPS. "But it seems that the aid has contributed more to slowing down the country's growth and demoting it from an intermediate-income country to a Heavily Indebted and Poor Country."

Contacted by telephone, an official at the Ministry of Finance, who wished to remain anonymous, denied Hiol's claims. According to him, the money borrowed was used to fund development projects such as the Yaounde-Douala highway in the 1980s, an international airport, schools, and several hospitals in Yaounde and Douala, the country's financial capital.

Cameroon was supposed to benefit from previous initiatives in the HIPC program, launched by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 1996. The program consists of total or partial debt cancellation from the multilateral financial institutions.

Unfortunately, critics say the initiative has not produced the desired results, due to the stringent conditions attached to it.

As a result, civil societies have called on the government to demonstrate greater incisiveness in fighting corruption and making the justice system more independent so that it can track and prosecute senior officials accused of embezzlement.

"Our strategy is to improve governance, fight corruption, strengthen democracy and pursue appropriate development policies and programs," Frederic Nyambi, a Ministry of Planning official, told IPS.

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By Sylvestre Tetchiada