19/05/2012 (Coastweek) - Palm oil production in Cameroon will increase by 55,000 tons to 265,000 tons this year, up from last year’s 210,000 tons, thanks mainly to an increase in output from small-scale farmers in the Central African country’s southwestern and littoral regions, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER).

“Many small-scale farmers who were engaged mainly in cocoa and coffee production have started growing oil palm in recent years so as to diversify their sources of income given the growing number of buyers coming in from neighboring Equatorial Guinea and Gabon,” the ministry said a report obtained by Xinhua on Monday.

Weekend field reports said buyers from the neighboring countries go as far as to dealing directly with farmers in villages since most industrial production is scheduled for exports.

As a result, the price on the local market has risen from 550- 600 CFA francs/litre in the previous year to 650-700 CFA francs/ litre.

The report also linked the expected hike to a rise in production from industrial plantations due to good weather.

It said encouraged by the growing interest in oil palm production, the ministry will deploy more technicians to train the small-scale farmers on better farming techniques in the two regions as well as in the southern region, with similar climate.

To move is to further boost production within the framework of the “second generation” agriculture launched by the president during the January 2011 agro-pastoral show in the southern town of Ebolowa.

Palm oil is widely used in cooking in the Central African country and the production of washing and bathing soap and other finished and semi-finished products.

Cameroon’s palm oil output is expected to go up to 300,000 tons and above by 2016, thanks to Biopalm Energy Ltd, a subsidiary of Singapore’s Siva Group which launched a 900 billion CFA francs project in the sector in August 2011 in collaboration with the National Investment Corporation (SIC) over 200,000 hectares.

The country is attracting several major industrial growers in the sector, the latest being New York-based multinational agricultural firm Herakles Farms which has already nursed seeds for developing a 69,975-hectare plantation in the southwestern region.

Its chief executive officer Bruce Wrobel, after talks with Secretary General at the presidency Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh last Friday, said they are encouraged in developing the commercial oil palm project by the good quality of the country’s species.

Despite protests from national and international environmental organizations including the Yaounde-based Center for Environment and Development, Germany’s Save Wildlife Fund and Rainforest Rescue in Australia, he said the project is receiving good backing from the government.

“We have great support from the Cameroon government for the project...This is a very very important project for Cameroon but also for West Africa. You know Africa imported almost 5 billion dollars of palm oil from Indonesia last year which were harvested from trees they planted. But those trees came from Cameroon. You know exactly what this means for the country and for development here,” he told reporters.