84

Faced with the permanent risk of food insecurity in the Sudano-Sahelian zone of Cameroon, national and international public action is focusing more on the promotion of collective storage to innovate in regulation of the cereal market. The storage infrastructure, which is subject to sometimes contradictory operating management rules and is exposed to dichotomous visions of its purpose between promoters and beneficiaries, can be regarded as a common pool resource as defined by Ostrom. This lack of coherence has resulted in the failure of policies to support food security and development assistance. The paper investigates the conditions for the pooling of policies to organize innovation in storage and the results of the actions of the diverse actors. It analyses the relevance of these approaches in terms of their relative impact on the historical seasonality of cereal supply and the instability of domestic prices. The methodology uses secondary data from institutions and organizations that produce storage information (SODECOTON, WFP, Cereal Office, Ministry of Agriculture, NGOs), and market price monitoring (INS). The use of these data is complemented by a survey of about a hundred producer organizations (POs) benefiting from institutional support (NGOs, state projects), concerning their participation in the development and implementation of policies related to the collective storage system.JEL Codes: D49, R29, O12, Q11.