Prunus africana: money growing on trees? a plant that can boost rural economies in the Cameroon highlands

Cameroon supports some of the largest populations of the Afromontane hardwood pygeum (Prunus africana), a tree used traditionally for timber, fuel-wood and medicine. It is one of the major income sources for forest based communities in the highlands areas of Cameroon. This paper looks at methods and activities for the sustainable management of Pygeum and draws lessons for creating win-win situations for sustainable exploitation of this non-timber forest product. Despite the quota based regulatory framework in place and over two decades of research, developing sustainable harvesting techniques and regeneration planting, the species faces major problems of over-exploitation, illegal harvesting and degradation of its forest habitats.

Key constraints to developing the sector:

1. Complete lack of knowledge of the state and total amount of the resource of Prunus available in the wild and domesticated, in any given year and its location.
2. Lack of market information and its dissemination
3. Expensive and time-consuming administrative and bureaucratic requirements and corruption involved in obtaining licenses and export permits.
4. Limited processes to increase value-added
5. Difficulties associated with accessing capital for transformation/processing
6. Lack of quality control
7. Poor governance and transparency.

Based on the above constraints, the following recommendations are proposed:

• Sustainable management of wild, forest based pygeum
• Meeting CITES requirements so that exports do not collapse in the short-term
• Promotion of domestication and individual planting of pygeum to counter depletion in wild stocks
• Revision of the regulatory system for Prunus
• Enhancing the market chain 
• Increasing institutionaland organisational networks between regulatory bodies, producers, exporters and international manufacturers and buyers
• Increasing knowledge of the resource and optimising exploitation