A fire erupted at the Société de développement du coton (Sodecoton) factory in Maroua, the regional capital of the Far North, on Tuesday afternoon, consuming an estimated 200 tonnes of cotton, according to the company’s Managing Director, Mohamadou Bayero Bounou.

Sodecoton, an agro-industrial enterprise that oversees more than 200,000 producers and is 59% state-owned, is still assessing the extent of the damage. “The precise assessment of the damage is underway,” Bounou stated in a press release issued shortly after the incident. The total cost of the damage has not yet been specified.

The cause of the fire remains undetermined, and an investigation is currently underway. Local authorities speculate that the region’s current hot weather may have contributed to the fire. “It is April in the Far North. As I speak, we are at 45° in the shade, and the wind is blowing. These are factors that can aggravate the situation, as cotton is a flammable product,” Governor Midjiyawa Bakari was quoted as saying by media outlet Ecomatin.

This is not the first time Sodecoton has experienced such a disaster. In April 2017, a fire in one of the warehouses of the French logistics group Necotrans, located in the port of Douala, consumed a cotton cargo estimated at 2,481 tons, valued at over XAF2.3 billion. This incident occurred nearly 32 years after a similar disaster in 1985 when a cargo of 6,418 tons of cotton was destroyed in a fire at the warehouses of the French company Saga, as reported by Investir au Cameroun-Business in Cameroon. 

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