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Cassava – a Multi-Purpose Plant
Nigeria is making use of its cassava crop to diversify its economy
Cassava is Africa’s most important staple food crop, after maize, and Africa produces half of the world’s supply. The plant is used to make a starchy food called gari, and it is also a source for biofuel as well as animal feed. Nigeria is the world’s largest producer of cassava, producing around 45 million tonnes in 2009, almost 19% of total world production. Despite its preeminent position in cassava growing, Nigeria has yet to make much impact on the global cassava market, since most of its crop is consumed domestically. But with new initiatives under way aimed at increasing and improving cassava production and developing new ways to use the crop, Nigeria hopes to utilise cassava as part of its strategy to diversify its economy away from petroleum.
Initiatives to Boost Production
The major stakeholders in the cassava sector include the Nigeria Cassava Growers Association, an advocacy group drawn from those producing cassava, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a non-profit agricultural research group headquartered in Ibadan. Working together, these two are enabling growers to boost their crops with the help of the US Aid for International Development fund. Under the USAID programme, announced in 2009, 5’000 cassava growers are being furnished with high yielding varieties of cassava to plant and assisted to plant one hectare of the new crop. The aim is to upgrade the cassava stock among small growers, so as to allow farmers to raise their return from the current 12-15 tonnes of cassava per hectare to 40-50 tonnes per hectare.
The IITA is partnering with the Nigerian Farm and Infrastructure Foundation to carry out Nigeria’s part in a cassava improvement project funded by the UN’s Common Fund for Commodities (CFC). The Cassava Value Chains project is under way in Nigeria, Benin and Sierre Leone, and CFC has made USD1.6 million available for
distributing high quality cassava seedlings to growers and constructing new international standard cassava processing facilities.
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