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# Experts in the Agricultural sector chart ways for the development of the rural sector in Cameroon
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On September 09 and 10, 2020, the expert in the domain of Agriculture met in Yaounde, Cameroon to adopt a document that highlights the rural development strategy of 2020-2030.
Cameroon's vision of becoming an upper-middle-income country and of reducing poverty to less than 10 per cent by 2035 is an ambitious one. It would entail achieving a real per capita annual GDP growth rate of 5.5 per cent throughout the period up to 2035, which would represent a marked increase over historical levels. The most promising avenue for reducing extreme poverty in Cameroon is to improve rural people's livelihoods by boosting agricultural productivity, as 85 per cent of the country's poor live in rural areas. The agricultural sector continues to be of vital importance, employing around 50 per cent of the economically active population
and generating an estimated contribution of 22.3% (2015) GDP. This sector is chiefly composed of some 2 million small family farms, and many of these households, especially those that include unskilled rural women and youth, are home to the poorest people in the population. The country has a comparative advantage in primary products thanks to a relative abundance of natural resources and unskilled and semi-skilled labour.
The main constraints on the development of the sector and on efforts to boost its productivity are: (i) the widespread use of traditional practices rather than modern technologies; (ii) a lack of suitable production, processing and
Magazine trimestriel d'informations du Ministère de l'Agriculture et du Développement Rural
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marketing infrastructure; (iii) limited access to financing and production inputs; (iv) the physical isolation of production areas from markets; (v) the limited capacity of public institutions in such areas as project management; (vi) shortcomings on the part of farmers' organizations; (vii) a lack of incentives for private-sector engagement; (viii) highly variable weather EB 2019/127/R.20 2 conditions; and (ix) a suboptimal application of the results-based management approach, particularly in the areas of performance monitoring and data production.