According to official projections, around 4 000 producers could be trained every year with the aim of producing quality cocoa with above-average market prices.Indeed, this government incentive is in addition to initiatives already undertaken by some exporters who have for years been engaged in the battle to improve the quality of Cameroonian cocoa, by encouraging the production of a certified cocoa.This is the case of Telcar Cocoa, a local merchant of the American Cargill,which has, during the last four cocoa growing seasons in Cameroon, distributed approximately 1.5 billion CFA francs of premiums to certified cocoa farmers.This can be explained by the phenomenon of liberalization. Indeed, the liberalization of cocoa marketing has had a negative impact on quality.The adoption in1992 of the packaging standards of the French Association of Cocoa Trade, instead of those of the FAO used by the former National Office for the Marketing of Commodities , resulted in the degradation of the quality of the raw products.The factors that may explain this deterioration in the quality of cocoa result in non-respect of the technical itineraries of pre- and post-harvest operations.
These important operations, even when they are carried out, are not always in line with good practice, especially with regard to Phytosanitary treatments, fermentation and drying. The smells of smoke and tar, pesticide residues, and the almost disappearance of grade I are the consequences.The introduction of GIs for Cameroon in the marketing of high-quality specific products could be an effective way to improve product quality, position itself in more profitable niche markets,hydroponic nft and help increase agricultural income and contribute to development. The approach is therefore primarily centered on quality rather than quantity, the latter having to follow once the price premiums achieved. The high demand for high quality coffee and cocoa, particularly United States and the EU appears to be advocating for diversification to high quality products.The approach by the quantity aims contrary to the one developed above, to increase the production, the quality will follow by a domino effect due to the external constraints in particular in the respect of the international standards. This approach focuses on the concept of agricultural productivity. Indeed, the theoretical approach of productivity finds all its meaning in that it is a means of measuring agricultural performance. From the physiocratic theory to the neoclassical theory of distribution, it occupies a place of choice in economic thought.This interest has been at the origin of a remarkable evolution of economic theory and the microeconomic theory of production .
From the physiocratic theories to the neoclassical theory of distribution, the notion of productivity began to be clarified with the work of Quesnay . This pioneering author, himself a landowner, finds that by incurring higher fees, the land is better grown with less labor and gives its owner a larger product. He deduces what will later be called the agricultural surplus theory. At the same time Turgot establishes on the contrary that the land provides decreasing returns as the less fertile land is cultivated. Malthus takes up this argument by referring to the “limited power of production of the earth” in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798.The English classics introduce the notion of labor productivity, to designate the physical performance of work. Research on the causes of Adam Smith’s wealth of nations in 1976 opens with a first book on “the causes that have perfected the productive faculties of labor”. The agricultural surplus theory establishes above all the role of capital advances in increasing agricultural production,and hence in increasing national income, and then considers agriculture as the sole source of productive wealth of labor as the “quantity of work that the same number of arms can provide” and develops the idea that it can be improved by the “division of labor”. Thus, labor productivity gains resulting from it, benefit the wage-earners by encouraging a fall in the prices of manufactured goods.
The marginalist school operates a complete reversal of the problem, taking advantage of the work of J. B. Say . The latter author thinks that production involves the productive services of three elements: the industry of man,capital, and natural agents. He finds empirically that whoever has one of these elements useful for production may demand remuneration when he gives up his use. It states that productivity remains a size attached to work, since it defines the degree of productivity per quantity produced in exchange for a certain amount of wages and a productivity indicator corresponding to the inverse of a cost. fixed unit rate of production. S. Jevons goes further in the analysis of capital income based on the idea of linking the remuneration of the means of production and their marginal contribution to the production. His successors in the neoclassical school, develop an analysis of the marginal returns of capital and the marginal productivity of labor and make them tools of distribution of total income between the factors of production.