Implications of Child Labour for Agricultural Production, Productivity and food security in Cameroon

The farming system in Africa is characterized by small peasant family farms whose production and productivity depend on the participation of all members of the family including children. In Cameroon, as elsewhere in African production, the traditional agricultural sector is based on an impressive division of labour along gender and age lines. Farm operations such as clearing and hunting are carried out by men, while others such as planting and weeding are culturally assigned to women and children. A major postulate of these laws is that the rights of children are abused and their physical bodies exploited. This structure and organization of the African family farm have an impact on the family and food security in African countries. Since 1919, a number of milestones have been achieved in the fight against child labour. These include the 1999 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (No. 182), culminating in the establishment of the World Day Against Child Labour in 2002 (ILO, 2003:6). An empirical analysis of the family farm through a case study in Momo Division of the North West Province of Cameroon confirms that the productivity of food crop-based and cash crop-based agricultural enterprises using cocoyam and coffee as sample crops is greatly influenced by competing economic, social and cultural factors such as the crop itself, age and gender. A multistage random sampling technique was adopted in the selection of a sample of 120 farmers. The results show that farm size per family range from < 1.0 ha to 4.0 ha for cocoyam production with an average of 1.24 hectares, and from <1.0 ha to 7.0 hectares for coffee production with an average of 1.54 hectares. The main sources of labour on both enterprises were family, hired and exchange/communal. For the two crops approximately 46% women contributed to the total labour required as against 33% for men and 21 for children. Women (89.7%) were more engaged in hiring labour than men (66.4%). Farm operations that employed more children and women than men included land preparation, weeding, harvesting and marketing. Recommendations are made for further research particularly policy studies on food, agriculture and rural development within the context of food self sufficiency, food security and sustainable development.Key words: child labour, cocoyam, coffee, person days, gender, agricultural production and productivity, food security, and rural developmen