(Business in Cameroon) - The Cameroonian Minister of Commerce signed last April 14 two decrees. One makes mandatory the "prior submission of price lists for certain FMCGs", while the other sets the list of products and services whose "prices and tariffs must be submitted to an approval procedure, before any sale on the national market."

Under the first decree, the government and operators of eight consumer goods will first agree on the price scale to be set for the final consumer. These goods include pasta, sardines, margarine, alcohol and spirits, detergents and household soaps, packaging, electrical cables and wires, paints, and tiles. Minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana said, "the prior submission of price lists and tariffs applies to producers, importers, and wholesalers of the products listed."

“These products flood the market and their prices are set by producers, importers, and other retailers. Hence the need to regulate them, given their ever-increasing demand,” an official of the ministry explained. 

This new decree renders obsolete a list of products previously published by the Minister and whose prices are subject to the same administrative constraints. Indeed in the February 2016 decree, the member of the government had decided on a list of 10 products subject to the prior submission of price lists. Tea, coffee, bread, paper, and sanitary towels that were on the 2016 list are no longer affected by a price approval.

The second decree makes public a new list of 17 products whose prices must be approved by the government "before any sale on the national market". These are milk, rice, fish, crude palm oil, refined vegetable oils, cooking salt, sugar, bread and pastries, flours, mineral water, beer and drinks, domestic gas, cement, concrete iron, roofing sheets, services of the auxiliaries of the maritime transport, port services, and public transport.

As in the previous decree, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana specifies that the previous list adopted on 22 May 2015 is repealed. This list included 22 products and services. The prices of wheat flour, cornflour, imported rice, services offered by hotels and tourist establishments, social housing, school, and university housing, books, and textbooks, natural, industrial, or medical gas, medicines and hospital consumables; and water and related services are no longer subject to approval.

Ludovic Amara