Investing in African Agribusiness in 2026

Most agribusiness investment theses for Africa in 2026 start with a commodity price forecast. That is the wrong place to start. The commodity price is the part everyone already knows. What decides the outcome is whether you are investing in production or in everything that happens before and after production — and, in the case of cocoa, whether you are investing at all.

This article sets out what the numbers actually say and where the defensible positions are.

The warning about cocoa

Cocoa was, until recently, the standard bearer. In 2025 it accounted for 26.3% of Cameroon's export revenue, surpassing crude oil at 22.9% — the first time since the 1970s that cocoa had outranked crude. It looked like a genuine structural shift in the country's export base.

The 2025/26 season, closed 15 July 2026, reversed it:

• Marketed production 247,914 tonnes, down 19.9% from 309,518.
• Beans exported 125,469 tonnes, down 34.7% from 192,012.
• Export value XAF 400.9 billion, down 63% from XAF 1.07 trillion.
• Closing stocks 40,446 tonnes, up 190% from 13,946.

Read those four numbers together. Volume fell by a third. Revenue fell by two-thirds. That gap is price, and the price is the global cocoa cycle, not anything Cameroonian producers control. Stocks tripling tells you what happened next: the beans were there and the buyers were not.

Free-on-board Douala prices fell to XAF 1,520–3,110/kg in 2025/26, against XAF 3,808–7,536/kg in 2024/25. Cameroon is the world's fifth-largest producer, which gives it no pricing power.

The practical conclusion: a cocoa production thesis is a bet on the cocoa price. If your return depends on the price recovering, you are underwriting a commodity view and should treat the model accordingly. Do not present it as an agribusiness thesis.

There is one further fact that should stop most production entrants. Buyer concentration in this sector is severe:

• Telcar Cocoa — 40,631 t, 32.4%
• Ofi Cam — 24,394 t, 19.4%
• SBET — 23,223 t, 18.5%
• Top three combined: 70.3%

As a grower or a cooperative, your counterparty is effectively one of three firms. Destinations are Europe 84.6%, Asia 14% — so you are also exposed to European regulatory and demand decisions you cannot influence.

The opportunity that is real: transformation

If production is a price bet, the more defensible position sits downstream. And the interesting fact is that transformation is where the sector is most under-built.

Local cocoa transformation fell 13% in the same season that production fell 19.9%. That is the gap. Cameroon is one of the world's largest cocoa producers and processes a comparatively small share of its own crop locally.

This is the structural argument for agribusiness investment in the region, and it does not depend on the cocoa price:

• Processing captures margin that commodity sales do not. The price fall compressed growers and buyers; it does not compress the value of grinding, roasting, butter, powder and liquor capacity.
• Domestic demand exists and is largely unserved by domestic supply. A market that must import processed product it grows itself is an inefficiency, and inefficiencies of that kind are what processing capacity is for.
• Regulatory and standards requirements are a moat. European buyers impose traceability, residue and certification requirements. Meeting them once, and doing it at scale, is an asset smaller operators cannot replicate.

The counter-argument deserves stating. Processing is capital-intensive, it needs working capital to absorb a crop, and it is a different competency from farming. Investors who move into processing without agricultural supply relationships are buying a factory that has to bid for its own inputs against their suppliers' other customers.

So the defensible structure is vertically integrated or contractually locked: own or control supply, and own the processing. Not one without the other.

The incentive position is unusually good here

Unlike mining, agriculture sits inside the eligible sectors of Cameroon's investment incentive regime. Under Ordonnance n°2025/002 of 18 July 2025, agriculture is the first of eight eligible sectors — while mining, upstream petroleum, gas, commerce and distribution are explicitly excluded.

This is worth dwelling on, because the contrast with our mining analysis is stark. Two resources, two investors, two completely different incentive positions in the same country.

The mechanics for an eligible agribusiness investor:

• Installation phase — up to five years of full exemption from customs duty, VAT and registration duty, plus patent exemption.
• Exploitation phase — corporate income tax credit of 25% for investment under XAF 1 billion, 50% for XAF 1–5 billion, 75% above XAF 5 billion, rising to 30%, 55% and 80% inside a Development Priority Zone. Credits are capped at 50% of declared profit and carry forward five years.

Eligibility is not automatic. An applicant must satisfy at least two of five tests — jobs per XAF 50m invested, Cameroonian natural-resource inputs, Cameroonian goods in turnover, value added over standard, or exports of at least 25% of turnover. Applications are adjudicated within ten working days through a single window inside the API, the Agence de Promotion des Investissements.

Modelling note: use conversion ratios, not the projections. The API's own mid-term assessment of the 2014–2024 programme found 453 companies approved against about XAF 8 trillion of projected investment and 180,000 projected jobs — but for the subset actually assessed, roughly XAF 1.9 trillion invested and more than 16,000 jobs created. That is about a quarter of projected capital realised.

Where else agribusiness risk actually sits

Credit, not politics, is the financial constraint. Cameroon's non-performing loan ratio was approximately 14.3% in 2024; across CEMAC the bad-loan ratio fell two points to 15.4% in the year to June 2026. The BEAC policy rate stands at 4.75%, having been raised 25 basis points on 15 December 2025, and BEAC has halted a key refinancing facility for productive investment across the bloc. A leveraged local structure is underwriting asset quality, not just sovereign risk. An agribusiness operator dependent on local working-capital debt is exposed to exactly the facility that has been withdrawn.

Power is a binding constraint on processing. Processing is energy-intensive, and the IMF has explicitly linked power transmission bottlenecks to Cameroon's growth constraints. Installed capacity reached 2,280 MW at end-2025 against a 3,500 MW target — a 1,220 MW shortfall, with roughly 65% of the target still to be built. For a plant, that is a difference between your cost base and your competitor's, and it should be modelled as such rather than assumed away.

The infrastructure pipeline is large and mostly unfunded. The CAR–Cameroon mining corridor has US$6 billion of Exim Bank of India financing for roughly 1,350 km to Kribi, with design capacity cited at up to 300,000 tonnes a day. But port infrastructure at Kribi remains undefined and the two states do not control the corridor jointly. Do not build an export-dependent model on a corridor whose delivery date has already slipped.

Security is regional and uneven. Boko Haram attacks continue in the Far North and separatist conflict persists in the Northwest and Southwest. Most agricultural production is not in those zones, but national logistics and insurance costs reflect them, and any specific site needs its own assessment rather than a national average.

Conversion is the term to watch. Cameroon's overall export position is underexposed to value addition. The 2024 export mix was overwhelmingly primary: mineral fuels 48.6%, cocoa 27.1%, wood products 10.2% — the top three at 85.9%, and the top ten at 97.1%. An economy exporting beans, logs and logs-and-logs is an economy with a conversion opportunity. That is the investment case in one line.

How we would underwrite an agribusiness opportunity

• Is the return from price or from capability? If price, be honest about it and size the position accordingly.
• Is supply controlled or bought? Processing without supply control means bidding for inputs against your own suppliers' other customers.
• Does the project qualify under Article 3, and can it satisfy two of the five tests? Get that confirmed before committing capital, not after.
• What is the power cost at the actual site, at the actual hours of operation? Not the national average.
• What is the working-capital structure, and does it survive the BEAC facility remaining halted?
• Where does the processed product sell, and what does it displace? A domestic market that already imports is a different proposition from one that exports into Europe.

Before you commit

For the market and counterparty work that a project of this kind requires, our investment advisory services cover sector assessment, incentive eligibility and partner identification. If you want the incentive position checked against a specific structure before it is built, start a conversation — and bring the numbers, because the useful conversation is about conversion ratios and power costs, not about whether agriculture is promising.