ABSTRACT
Under German rule, Yaounde was a military post of some importance, but not the administrative or commercial capital of Cameroon. The history of Yaounde's food supply is one dimension of the growth of social differentiation by class, by occupation, and by regional specialisation. The characteristic dilemmas which emerged time and again from the various interventions derive from the great difficulty of constructing a situation in which the class implications of maintaining low consumer prices, and therefore low margins and returns to traders and farmers, can coexist with the social control implications of needing an accessible, and therefore socially prominent, category of producers and traders. After independence, direct methods of controlling the food supply were no longer possible to impose. There has been government intervention of one kind or another in urban food supply throughout the 1970s, but the form has been piecemeal and eclectic.
