On the ground
The corporation farms its estates and processes on site. The places named below are the ones CDC publishes.
Three projects to raise production, open new rural areas and support smallholders.
Rubber · Bona Lea Sub-Division, Moungo, Littoral Region
Oil palm · Donga Mantung Division, North West Region
Oil palm and rubber · Manyu Division, South West Region
Matouke was launched in 2007, with the first plantings the following year, and designed to bring 6,000 hectares of rubber into production over five years. It sits in the Bona Lea Sub-Division of Moungo, in the Littoral Region, inside Cameroon's uni-modal agro-ecological zone.
1,712 hectares have been planted and the first tapping began in 2015. More than 610 permanent workers are employed on the project.
Building a plantation from nothing also means building somewhere to live. More than 312 camp rooms have gone up for workers, with electricity from a generator and drinking water drawn from a borehole running on solar panels.
Donga Mantung began in 2011 and is designed around 10,000 hectares of oil palm smallholdings in the Donga Mantung Division of the North West Region. It is the only one of the three projects outside CDC's traditional Littoral and South West footprint.
The model here is not a CDC estate but smallholders growing on their own land. CDC runs an oil palm nursery on site to supply them with seedlings, which is the part of a smallholder scheme that usually decides whether it works.
Manyu also launched in 2011, designed around 10,000 hectares of smallholdings in the Manyu Division of the South West Region. It carries both crops rather than one, which is why there are two nurseries on site instead of one.
Between them, Donga Mantung and Manyu account for 20,000 hectares of planned smallholder development, against the 42,027 hectares CDC farms directly. Taken together they are a substantial shift in how the corporation grows.
