01 of 05 · Sowing
Certified seed fixes the staple potential.
One cultivar and even germination decide how evenly a lot drafts at spinning. A mixed-cultivar lot cannot be sorted again at the gin.
Ticket gains: cultivar, planting window
Value chain / Stage 01 · Field agronomy and lot origin
Provenance starts
in northern soil.
More than 220,000 northern growers harvest over 300,000 tonnes of seed cotton a year across Cameroon’s cotton belt. Recording producer-group lots at the village market writes the first link in a traceable garment.
Examine the field processProcedural visualisation. Schematic, not a facility.
01 / Harvest console
Northern Cameroon harvests over 300,000 tonnes of seed cotton a year while the wider CFA zone contracted.
Pick a season on the chart, the scrubber or a splash pill, then a metric. Each boll is one northern harvest, and the read-out carries its source.
Axis in thousands of tonnes (k), from zero. Unginned field weight, lint plus seed.
Schematic share of quality fixed by the end of each phase. Illustrative, not measured.
Lot ticket so farCultivarPlanting windowProducer groupBasinInput categoryCampaign yearRain-fed statusHarvest date windowCleanliness classMoistureVillage weight
02 / The plant, one phase per step
Five agronomic phases fix staple length, maturity and trash content before the gin.
02 of 05 · Canopy
One extension calendar reaches more than 220,000 growers.
Rain-fed plots in the northern belt share advice on fertiliser, pests and timing through the SODECOTON network. Documented basin data beats a generic life-cycle average.
Ticket gains: producer group, basin, input category
03 of 05 · Flowering
The weeks after flowering set the staple length.
Fibre cells reach their full length soon after the flower opens. Water stress in that window shortens the fibre and shows up later as short-fibre content in spinning.
Ticket gains: campaign year, rain-fed status
04 of 05 · Maturation
Cellulose layers decide maturity and dye affinity.
Layers build inside the fibre for weeks. Immature fibre collapses into neps that resist dye, which reads as white specks on finished cloth in wet processing.
Ticket gains: harvest date window
05 of 05 · Picking
Clean picking keeps a clean lot clean to the gin.
Open bolls are picked, sorted by cleanliness and weighed at the village market. Foreign matter and plastic enter here, so the first ticket is written here too.
Ticket gains: cleanliness class, moisture, village weight
03 / One organised basin, drawn
SODECOTON links more than 220,000 growers to nine gins and roughly US$100 million a year in rural cash.
Northern cotton runs through one organised basin, not layers of unrecorded middlemen. Choose a layer to light it; the ledger below lights its node.
Growers layer
>220,000
cotton producers supported across northern Cameroon, per SODECOTON’s company profile . Each dot is about 1,000 growers; a schematic, not a map.
Gins and mills layer
9 gins, 2 mills
receive the seed cotton . Lint is separated from seed here, at Stage 02, and the village lot ticket must survive this gate.
Rural cash layer
≈US$100m a year
injected into rural communities, as reported by Financial Fortune Media . A trade-press figure from the programme annex, not reverified.
| Sourced figure | Scope | Ref | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed-cotton harvest, 2022 | 330,000 t | Unginned national field weight. | ||
| Seed-cotton harvest, 2023 | 314,455 t | Study-window baseline year. | ||
| Seed-cotton harvest, 2024 | about 340,000 t | Latest reported outturn, 2026 source refresh. | ||
| Seed-cotton projection, 2025 | above 350,000 t | Trade-press projection, not an outturn. | ||
| CFA-zone cotton crop, 2024/25 | 2.3 million t, down 11.5% | Wider franc-zone comparison crop. | ||
| Producers, gins and oil mills | >220,000 growers; 9 gins; 2 mills | SODECOTON company profile in the annex. | ||
| Rural cash flow | roughly US$100m a year | Rural liquidity attributed to SODECOTON. |
04 / How Stage 01 shapes factory location
Cotton grows in the north while the port and the largest urban markets sit in the south.
Drag the factory along the corridor. One leg grows as the other shrinks, and the read-out names the anchor beside you.
Pole A · Garoua and the northern belt
Cotton on the doorstep, finished goods on a long haul.
- Beside the growers and nine gins of SODECOTON
- Camtext SA project: about 3,000 jobs at Garoua
- CICAM Garoua ran at 33.7 percent utilisation in July 2023
Pole B · Douala and the Dibamba corridor
Port and market close by, raw material on a long inbound leg.
- Next to Cameroon’s main seaport and largest consumer centres
- Camtext SA project: about 12,000 jobs at the Dibamba hub
- Lint or yarn travel south from Stages 02 and 03, for faster domestic distribution and regional export clearance
05 / Pooled or ticketed
A Digital Product Passport is only as credible as the village lot ticket captured at Stage 01.
Pool seed cotton anonymously before the gin and a garment can claim a country of origin at best, never a verifiable farm basin.
Pooled before the gin
Origin claim = country
Ticketed at the village
Origin claim = producer group and basin
About 95 percent of Cameroon’s cotton fibre is exported raw and 5 percent processed locally : a pooled lot leaves with nothing but its country. Schematic: twelve threads, not a count.
Lot ticket · Stage 01
Illustrative format · no real lot
06 / The ticket printer
GFT proposes four mandatory field-gate custody fields.
01 of 04 · Origin node
Producer group code and collection zone.
Each seed-cotton module leaving a northern village market carries the code of its producer group inside SODECOTON’s network of more than 220,000 growers.
02 of 04 · Agronomic inputs
Seed variety, campaign year and input class.
Proposed: record the cultivar, the campaign year (the 2023 crop of 314,455 t, the 2024 crop of about 340,000 t) and the input category, so lifecycle models can tell basin data from generic averages.
03 of 04 · Primary sorting
Cleanliness class and a moisture check.
Village collection separates clean first-pick seed cotton from stained or leaf-heavy bolls. Recording moisture before module storage guards against heating and yellow spotting ahead of ginning.
04 of 04 · Mass reconciliation
Net weight tied to a gin intake lot.
Weighbridge tickets reconcile village dispatch weight with arrival at one of the nine gins, so nothing is blended unrecorded before lint bales receive their Stage 02 serial identifiers.
07 / Hand-over to Stage 02: Ginning
Unginned seed cotton leaves the field with its producer-group lot ticket intact.
At the gin gate the denominator changes from field weight to lint bales and cottonseed. Move the lot across the gate and read what changes.
Stop 1 of 3 · Field
Tonnes of unginned seed cotton
Field weight, lint plus seed . The ticket is the producer-group lot ticket, written at the village market.
Stop 2 of 3 · At the gate
The lot ticket must not be lost
Seed cotton leaves the village on its weighbridge ticket. Before it is ginned, field weight is about to become bales and seed.
Stop 3 of 3 · Gin
Lint bales and cottonseed
Co-products at nine gins and two oil mills . About 95 percent of Cameroon’s cotton fibre is exported raw , so this gate sets what the bale can prove.
Programme-annex figures (prepared 31 January 2024, refreshes flagged 2026); drawings and gauges are schematic; not investment, legal or tax advice.
Methodological and legal qualification
Agronomic and institutional figures on this page come from GFT’s Cameroon textile programme annex (prepared 31 January 2024; source refreshes flagged 2026) . Seed-cotton tonnage is unginned harvest weight. Index and change figures are GFT arithmetic from the cited tonnes. Schematic drawings and gauges are illustrative. Nothing here is investment, legal or tax advice.
Lot ticket · printed · no real lotSealed
- 01 · GroupWritten
- 02 · CultivarWritten
- 03 · GradeWritten
- 04 · WeighbridgeWritten
A garment can only be as traceable as the first ticket written at the edge of the field.
At the Gin stop the stub is torn off and kept at the village.