Consultant for Developing a WWF Regional Cocoa Strategy

Description de l'offre

TERMS OF REFERENCE Consultant for Developing a WWF Regional Cocoa Strategy World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Central Africa seeks a Consultant for development of its Regional Cocoa Strategy (2021-2025). Background Countries of the Congo Basin, with the world's second largest tropical rainforest, are largely dependent economically on natural resources including agriculture. For all these countries, their largest export earners are the extractive industries. However, in all these countries, agriculture remains the main source of employment and livelihoods for rural populations. Most farmers practice traditional agriculture mixing food crop agriculture (cassava, plantains, yams, peanuts, maize, millet, rice) for subsistence and local market and cash crops (sugarcane, banana, peanuts, tobacco, cocoa, coffee, rubber, oil palm) for income. Smallholders dominate production, under this system, there are tremendous gaps between actual and potential yields. Commodities vary across countries, regions and climatic zones. With the falling prices of extractive resources, these countries are all now looking to agriculture as a potential lever for economic development. Cocoa is an important international commodity and the different countries have established special programs to revitalize and expand the sector. Cameroon for instance launched its National Plan to re-vitalize the cocoa and coffee value chains by 2020 while Gabon instituted the Programme Jeunes Entrepreneurs Café/Cacao (JECCA) and the Republic of Congo in collaboration with OLAM-CIB launched the National Cocoa Development Plan (PND-Cacao). Despite these different initiatives to revitalize the cocoa sector in all these countries, only Cameroon is amongst the world's top producing countries occupying respectively the third and fifth positions at continental and global levels behind Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria with an estimated average annual production of 200,000 metric tons. With still a high forest cover, it is feared that if the countries of the region continue on the same development pathway with the objective of …