North Region
Cameroon's North Region runs on a single crop controlled by a single company. SODECOTON, 89% government-owned after a 2024 buyout of its private shareholders, manages the cotton production of over 200,000 farmers across the Sudanian savanna — from seed distribution through ginning to export. Remove SODECOTON and the region has no functioning cash-crop economy. This is keystone-species dependency at industrial scale: one entity whose failure restructures everything around it.
The monoculture is not accidental. The North Region receives 900 to 1,500 millimetres of annual rainfall — enough to support cotton but not enough to make alternatives equally profitable under existing infrastructure. Every ginning plant, every buying station, every seasonal credit line reinforces the same crop. A farmer cannot shift to peanuts without forfeiting SODECOTON's input credit that season; dual operations require capital that cotton farming does not generate. Livestock and informal cross-border trade exist as supplements, but neither substitutes for the cash income cotton provides. The trap is structural, not coercive. Path-dependence compounds annually until the system can only reproduce itself.
The region's second keystone — physical infrastructure rather than institutional control — is failing faster. The Lagdo Dam, completed in 1982 on the Benue River, was built with 7.7 billion cubic metres of reservoir capacity. Siltation has reduced that to roughly 1.6 billion cubic metres, a 79% loss in four decades. The dam regulates Garoua's dry-season water supply, irrigates farmland, and generates electricity for the regional capital. Below some threshold of functional capacity, these services fail sequentially — irrigation first, then water supply, then power — and the downstream economy reorganises around scarcity rather than surplus. Garoua itself, Cameroon's third-largest city, operates a river port on the Benue navigable only from June to November, funnelling cotton and hides 1,900 kilometres downriver toward Nigerian ports. For the remaining seven months, the region depends on road transport through territory where Boko Haram's southward displacement from the Far North has made transit unpredictable. The dry season drains the region of its only reliable export channel; insecurity drains confidence in the alternative.