(Business in Cameroon) - In its 2014-2015 roadmap for the creation of the Cameroon Commodities Exchange (CCX), the Eleni LLC firm, which is advising the government on this project, has selected eight agricultural products to be sold on the platform.

Among the commodities to be gradually sold on the CCX over a four-year period, the firm has indicated that there will be cocoa and corn (first year), sorghum, millet and dry cassava (2^nd year), palm oil and rice paddies (3^rd year) and cotton (4^th year).

What is noticeably absent on the CCX list is coffee. This is due to the general lack of interest in coffee cultivation at this time as prices are hardly profitable (half of those of cocoa) and also the volume of production (30,000 tonnes in 2013-2014 compared to 16,000 tonnes in 2012-2013) has not helped either.

To achieve the critical trade volumes necessary to determine real prices, the Eleni firm recommends that the Cameroonian government mandate that all transactions below 5 tonnes be done on the CCX by wholesalers, groups, processers, exporters and any other institutions registered on the stock exchange.

The sale of these products on the CCX appears to be all the more suitable because, as Eleni LLC indicated on April 9, 2014 when presenting its preliminary report to the government, the current sales network is riddled with pitfalls. These are mainly related to the poor road conditions in farming areas, which increase transportation costs and make market access difficult. There is also the issue of mutual distrust between sellers and buyers, the lack of information on market and warehouse prices and the restriction on sales options which obliges farmers to sell to the first buyer they meet.

The feasibility study the CCX hired Eleni LCC to carry out, which led to the implementation of Ethiopia’s stock exchange, was financed by a 50 million FCFA convention signed on February 17, 2014 between the International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) and the State of Cameroon. According to Eleni LLC, the CCX could be operational 12 months after the completion of the feasibility study, which was finished in September 2014, according to authorised sources.