NEW CHALLENGES IN THE CASSAVA TRANSFORMATION IN NIGERIA

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NEW CHALLENGES IN THE CASSAVA TRANSFORMATION IN NIGERIA AND GHANA

INTRODUCTION

Cassava is Africa s second most important food staple, after maize, in terms of calories consumed. Cassava is a major source of calories for roughly two out of every five Africans. In some countries, cassava is consumed daily and sometimes more than once a day. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter the Congo), cassava contributes more than 1000 calories per person per day to the diet and many families eat cassava for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cassava is consumed with a sauce made with ingredients rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals. In the Congo, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia, cassava leaves are consumed as a vegetable (Jones 1959; Fresco 1986; Dostie et al. 1999; Haggblade and Zulu 2003). Cassava leaves are rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals (Latham 1979).

Nevertheless, in Africa, cassava is a marginalized crop in food policy debates because it is burdened with the stigma of being an inferior, low-protein food that is uncompetitive with the glamour crops such as imported rice and wheat. Many food policy analysts consider cassava an inferior food because it is assumed that its per capita consumption will decline with increasing per capita incomes. In some East and Southern African countries, such as Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, British colonial policies forced indigenous farmers to plant cassava as a faminereserve measure and subsidized maize grown by settler farmers (Jones 1959). That policy has stigmatized cassava in the minds of many African farmers as a colonial crop (Marter 1978).

THE CASSAVA TRANSFORMATION IN AFRICA

The dramatic cassava transformation1 that is under way in Nigeria and Ghana is Africa s best kept secret. The cassava transformation describes how the new TMS varieties have transformed cassava from a low-yielding, famine-reserve crop to a high-yielding cash crop that is

This does not mean transformation in the processing sense from fresh root to processed forms.

prepared and consumed as gari, a dry cereal . With the aid of mechanical graters to prepare gari, cassava is increasingly being produced and processed as a cash crop for urban consumption in Nigeria and Ghana.

In Africa, traditionally, cassava is produced on small-scale family farms. The roots are processed and prepared as a subsistence crop for home consumption and for sale in village markets and shipment to urban centers.

Over the past 50 years, smallholders in Nigeria and Ghana have increased the production of cassava as a cash crop, primarily for urban markets. This shift to commercial production for urban consumers, livestock feed, and industrial uses can be described as the cassava transformation. During the cassava transformation, high-yielding cassava varieties increase yields while labor-saving and improved processing technologies reduce the cost of producing and processing cassava food products to the point where they are competitive with food grains such as wheat, rice, maize, and sorghum for urban consumers. Looking ahead, as the costs of cassava production, harvesting, processing, and marketing are reduced, one can expect cassava to play an expanded role as a source of livestock feed and industrial raw material in Africa as well as a source of foreign exchange earnings through the export of cassava pellets for livestock feed.

The cassava transformation, as described in detail by Nweke et al. (2002), encompasses four stages: Famine Reserve, Rural Food Staple, Urban Food Staple, and Industrial Uses and Livestock Feed (Table 1.1):

Stage I: Famine Reserve

Today in many countries in Eastern and Southern Africa — Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia — maize is the preferred food and cassava is planted as a famine-reserve crop. In the famine reserve stage, cassava is usually harvested late and often on a meal to meal basis. In fact, farmers in southern Madagascar plant tracts of cassava specifically as a hedge against drought. In normal rainfall years, farmers harvest only part of their cassava crop. But in drought years, when the main rice crop falters, they harvest their entire cassava crop, dry it and ship it throughout the country via a large network of private traders (Dostie et al. 1999).

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