Cassava: A boost for food security, rural development

May 27, 2016 in Feature Story, News

NYANGA — For many years, Robert Sachiwaya (59), a small-holder farmer in ward 30, Nyanga district, has been cultivating cassava on the sidelines of crops such as maize, groundnuts and potatoes, or as a boundary fence to his fields.

by TONDERAYI MATONHO

Just like many other farmers, unknown to Sachiwaya, this tuber has quietly taken over thousands of hectares and has become the staple food of over 200 million Africans.

“I have since realised that cassava is a valuable cash crop, with a flourishing market if grown on a larger scale,” Sachiwaya, a retired police officer, said.

According to experts, the economic potential for cassava — a crop crucial for food security and rural development — remains untapped despite constant growth in output.

A range of consumer and industrial international markets are critical as this tuber strives to become more competitive.

Market prospects for cassava have increased as many families in the Southern Africa region are turning to cassava, which requires less labour, especially where HIV-related illnesses have claimed the lives of many farmers.

Cultiv Agro Zimbabwe national co-ordinator Fredy Gwaimani said a number of factors explain this rapid expansion and competitiveness, especially smallholdings run by poor farmers where cassava is often grown together with other crops or just as perimeter fence.

“Cassava has the advantage of being relatively undemanding, and will thrive on poor and even tired soils, where few other crops will grow,” he said.

“In places where land is scarce, it also serves as food security for many villagers vulnerable to malnutrition.”

He said with cassava, villagers can be more confident of having a low-cost, plentiful supply of calories than they would have had if they had grown cereals.

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) figures indicate that Africa produced 103 million tonnes of cassava tubers on 18 million hectares of land in 2004.

This shrub, with its long stems and parasol-shaped leaves, is now as common in Sub-Saharan countries as it is in more humid climes of Central Africa and the Gulf of Guinea where it has traditionally thrived.

Also well-established in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which for a long time has been Africa’s leading producer, the crop has now spread to Southern Africa at the expense of maize, particularly Malawi, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.

In West Africa, development has been further helped by the rapid expansion of towns and by an initiative launched by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), which has distributed new, more productive varieties that are resistant to a number of diseases as well as to drought.

The flipside of the coin is that when this crop, which is vitally important to a number of regions, is hit by disease, the result is famine. This was seen clearly when the cassava mosaic virus devastated production in Uganda during the 1990s.

Burundi, DRC and Rwanda grappled with the same disease and programmes to distribute resistant varieties attempted to curtail the epidemic before it took hold.

“This plant has long been neglected by research in favour of cereals, but its recent rapid success and its key role in feeding a number of regions go a long way towards explaining the renewed attention it is enjoying today,” said Gwaimani, a specialist in agriculture and vulnerability assessments.

According to IITA, close to one-third of all cassava is eaten fresh.

The remainder needs to be processed quickly, as the tubers keep for barely two days under normal storage conditions.

Once the hydrocyanic acid has been removed from the bitter varieties, the edible leaves are rich in protein and the tubers lend themselves to a wide range of preparations: chips, flour, semolina and cassava meal, to name just a few, notes IITA.

In partnership with IITA, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development has launched the Pan-African Cassava Initiative to encourage projects based on “the use of cassava as a food security crop and as a weapon against poverty”.

Improving processing technologies for farmers, particularly women, is crucial if production costs are to fall significantly and both producers and processors are to earn enough income.

On the world market, cassava starch faces competition from less costly maize starch. In 2002, for example, maize starch imported from Europe to Nigeria cost three times less than local cassava starch.

“While small groups of fairly well-organised processors do exist, they are not always big enough to take advantage of economies of scale,” Diana Sedze, director of Chitsanza Development Association, based in Nyanga, said.

What’s more, cultivation and harvesting are still done entirely by hand.

According to the Collaborative Study of Cassava in Africa, conducted in the 1990s, this is partly explained by the considerable variation in size between one cassava plant and another and between the size of their roots, which makes it difficult to mechanise crop cultivation.

Experts further note that there are many other industrial uses to which this tuber lends itself.

Starch, the main product to be made from cassava, is used in the food and textile industries as well as in the pharmaceutical and rubber sectors.