Cameroon currently plays a marginal role on the world natural rubber market. Yet the country, and particularly the as yet under-developed smallholder sector, offers great potential for developing rubber cultivation. Improving productivity on smallholdings is useful in alleviating rural poverty, and necessary for asserting the position of Cameroonian rubber on the world market. In this paper, we therefore propose some lines of research based on an analysis of smallholder practices, namely: limiting the cost of setting up and maintaining plantations during the immature period, by producing planting material within the smallholder environment and proposing crop management sequences facilitating plantation management prior to tree opening, developing tapping systems enabling smallholders to improve work productivity whilst preserving their productive capital, limiting transport costs and adding value to smallholder production through post?harvest processing of rubber by smallholders, encouraging rubber smallholder groups, thereby enabling them to cope with problems that are difficult to solve individually, and to more effectively defend their interests.