Land seizures displacing smallholder farmers in Cameroon's Adamawa Region

In Cameroon's Adamawa Region, the law says the land belongs to the nation. What that means, in practice, is that it belongs to whoever the government decides to give it to.

In May 2022, the Cameroonian government handed 95,000 hectares of land in the Adamawa Region, 3 times the size of the capital Yaoundé, to a single company, Tawfiq Agro Industry, on a long lease. No environmental or social management plan was shared with the communities living and farming there. By August, those communities had sent a formal petition to President Paul Biya. Their collective spokesman put it plainly: "The way this deal was approached was not right. Deals were made with our district's elites in Yaoundé. Ninety-five thousand is too much to lose."

They lost it anyway.

This is not a scandal. It is the system functioning as intended.

The legal architecture enabling this dates to 1974. Under Ordinances No. 74-1 and 74-2, all land in Cameroon falls into one of three categories: state property, private property, or national land. National land is the category that swallows almost everything else, any plot that is unregistered or untitled falls into it, and the state controls it entirely, free to reallocate it by decree. The law was designed explicitly to attract commercial investment. It has done exactly that.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of rural Cameroonians have never registered their land. By 2008, only around 125,000 land certificates had been issued across the entire country. Today, approximately 3% of rural land carries a formal title, and that 3% belongs mostly to large commercial operators. The remaining 85% of Cameroon's land is held under customary tenure: ancestry, community memory, long use, the quiet recognition of neighbours. Under the 1974 framework, none of that constitutes legal ownership. It constitutes nothing.

Dr Januarius Asongu, rights activist and chancellor of Saint Monica University, Cameroon, has a name for what happens when formal institutions refuse to recognise what everyone can see. He calls it epistemic fracture: the point at which the legal system loses contact with the fullness of reality, treating documentary knowledge as legitimate and customary knowledge as invisible. "Families lose farms, graves, identity, livelihood, and intergenerational continuity," he says. "The state loses legitimacy. Investors lose moral credibility. Development loses its human purpose."

The Adamawa is a particular target because of what it has: over 2 million hectares of rangeland, a fertile plateau, and weak administrative infrastructure. That combination, productive land and thin governance, is precisely what large-scale investors look for. The Rights and Resources Initiative has found that more than 10 million of Cameroon's 22 million hectares of forest land are already committed to concessions of one kind or another, with an estimated $18 billion pipelined for agribusiness, forestry, mining and infrastructure across the country. UK Export Finance has backed a project to develop 15,000 hectares of ranch land in the Adamawa specifically. And in 2023, the government announced the 400,000-hectare corridor plan along the Batchenga–Ngaoundéré axis, running directly through the region, as the first phase of a project ultimately targeting 1.131 million hectares for medium and large-scale farming.

Nowhere in these announcements is there a serious account of what happens to the people already there.

Compensation, where it exists at all, covers standing crops at the moment of eviction. Not the land itself. Not the trees planted years ago. Not the accumulated value of soil a family has worked across generations. When communities push back, they face a process in which, as Dr Asongu describes it, "local elites speak for communities without real consent, and farmers lack the money to challenge the process." Civil society organisations have worked to document over 400 cases of rights infringements in the region and trained 150 Mbororo youths as paralegals. It is fragile scaffolding against a process backed by ministerial decree.

The Mbororo, nomadic Fulani pastoralists who make up around 10% of the Cameroonian population, face a compounded vulnerability. Their mobility, the very basis of their livelihood, is read under statutory law as an absence of land rights. They cannot demonstrate the effective occupation the system demands. Sedentary farmers at least have visible farms. The Mbororo have corridors and seasons, none of which appear on a concession map.

When a government protects investors while abandoning smallholders, Dr Asongu argues, it begins to resemble an internal colonial power. It is a hard phrase. It is also an accurate one. The 1974 ordinance was drafted to make Cameroon attractive to foreign capital. The communities occupying that land when the law was written were not part of the calculation, and fifty years later, they still are not.

What development looks like from a ministry in Yaoundé and what it looks like from a farming community in Tibati are two entirely different things. The corridor is coming. The concessions are signed. And the people in the way have a petition, some paralegals, and land they cannot prove is theirs.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://mboscuda-cmr.org/
https://earthly.org/projects/agroforestry-adamawa-cameroon
https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/

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