Cameroon, Day 47 - 53
Yesterday, I had ants in my pants. Fire ants. I suppose it could have been worse, right?
The more I collect data from these farms, the clearer (and more confusing at the same time) it becomes to me why there is such a cycle of poverty here, and really in places like this all over Africa.
I’ve been interview a bunch of farmers to find out every detail of their input costs, as well as their production and market prices. Doing this has given me a better idea of what the most profitable crops are (and often, that means the crops that end up causing less of a loss).
More than half of the farmers I've spoken to seem to be losing money farming on at least one of their main crops. The numbers just don’t add up. He’ll rattle off the costs of labor, tools, fertilizer, transport, etc. and then I’ll stack it up against what he would sell in an ordinary market and the estimated costs always exceed the revenue, even in a decent market. It just doesn't make sense.
I think it ultimately comes down to culture – and these farmers have developed a culture of subsidizing the country (and the world) with their labor. There’s no accounting for one’s own time in farm work here. What needs to be done simply gets done. Unfortunately, when you calculate a value for their time, you find that it causes people to literally generate pennies for every hour of labor.
That’s why these simple technologies we’re bringing over, like the corn scraper, are so impactful. They would be useless in the U.S. but in Cameroon, a simple, cheap piece of plastic can save people hours every day, and can save their hands from the tough repetition of grinding thousands of ears of corn.
Seriously, I’ve been amazed by the farmers’ responses to this little thing. I walked into a village with Marie to demonstrate it, and within minutes, we were surrounded by about 30 people and thunderous applause.
What’s even cooler is their response when we say it’s going to be somewhere between $2 - $4. I wish we had a few thousand to sell right now.
One eerie thing I’ve noticed here is how big the funeral business is here, and how consumerized it is. To give you an idea, I recently saw vehicles for these two companies:
Big Frank’s Funeral Service
Destiny Service (funerals) – yes the parentheses are included in the name.