Deep Dive
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I'm Laura Heighton-Gins, and today on Business Daily from the BBC World Service, we're finding out about cassava, a beige root vegetable, and so some believe, a store of vast buried wealth.
Nigeria is the world's largest cassava producer but barely exports, the country often importing products that compete with this indigenous crop. They have imported so much starch to an extent that our farmers are now selling at a loss, which is very, very devastating. So how can Nigeria capitalise on cassava? That's all coming up on today's programme. MUSIC PLAYS
This is Peckham, South East London, also known as Little Lagos for its big British Cnidarian community. And through popular demand, it's easy to get your hands on cassava here. I'm with Dr Louise Abou-Ami from the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich. What is cassava? Well, cassava is a root crop.
If you think of an elongated potato perhaps, and you can boil it, fry it like chips, form a powder with it, reconstitute it like instant mash, and you eat it with stew, so you don't eat it alone typically. So we're stepping into Bim's African food store, and straight away we've got cassava. £2.49 a kilo. I'm just going to go and say hi to the shop assistant. Hi, I'm Gadi. Ghebo Gadi.
Thank you.
and even frozen. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different cassava products all here on the counter. So the cassava roots, you've got gelatinized or roasted cassava, which is gari, which can be fermented or unfermented depending on your preference, taste preference. And then we've got cassava flour, and from the flour you can make fufu. Kind of looks like a dumpling. And you would eat that in a soup?
eat it with your stew and we've got three kinds of fufu here. This shop has done a marvelous job. Thank you so much. Lovely to meet you. Thank you. Goodbye.
So as we've seen, it's a very versatile crop. It's also known as a food security crop. Why is that? I would say predominantly because it can stay in the ground until you are ready to harvest and process and consume it.
The dietary importance of cassava is not to be underestimated. Professor Lateef Sani, project manager of Building Sustainable Cassava Systems in Africa, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, puts it into perspective. In sub-Saharan Africa developing countries, a lot of people eat cassava. Close to about half a billion population in the world eat cassava. A lot of people there eat cassava to survive.
If you took cassava away, how would it affect the world's population? I must tell you, a lot of populations, the farming, starfishes, a lot of problems will come in terms of survival. And I hope you know that Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world. We produce close to about 53 million to 60 million metric tons now. And so if you take cassava away,
It's like after the World War. World War III. In terms of survival, it's going to be tough. Protecting us from this kind of devastation is Nigeria's army of smallholder farmers who number in the millions and who do their work manually. Basi Oluwakemi Ibilola, known as Mrs. Kemi, has a five-hectare farm in Ogun State, southwestern Nigeria. Firstly, we branch the farm out
After that, we do our rooting so that we can be able to plant our cassava. We do the first weeding when the cassava is a month old or two months old. The second weeding will come out when the cassava is six months. That one will take us to the harvest.
We labour a lot before we can be able to finish it. Even at times, we might not be able to complete the planting because of the stress and the hard labour. If we use machines to do our farming, we can cultivate like 100 hectares of land. And planting agriculture will be very, very easy for us. But I don't have enough money to afford it.
because we cannot apply our whole capital, my whole capital on machinery alone. It's a combination of factors that keep small-scale farmers small. My name is Che Dozie Egesi. I am the Executive Director and CEO of the National Root Crops Research Institute in Umudike, Nigeria.
First of all, there's a dislink between getting timely supply of agro-imputs like fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. There's some efforts that have happened in recent times, but it's not sustained, right? They need access to good seed.
Because without good seed, you cannot guarantee any good yield. They also need data to tell them where to sell their produce per time. That's an issue. Then they need to move away from rudimentary use of cutlass, machete, and hose to produce cassava like our great-grandfathers used. That's still what is majorly used today. Meanwhile, there are tractors that can make life easier, that can make productivity bigger and more efficient.
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I'm Laura Heiting-Gins. Today we're finding out about the power of the Nigerian staple crop, cassava. Dancing.
I'm tempted to join in with the street party that Dr Louise Abayomi and I are heading to get lunch at Nigerian restaurant The Flygerians. I think our food's coming. What is this? This is a bar and a four-year-old. Nicely presented. Thank you. Thank you so much. So I'm going to try this for the first time. You can try it without the sauce initially.
Zero salt. There's no salt. It's a rich flavour though. It's flavourful. It's the sourness because of that fermentation. Right. That's good. So this is gari with hot water in essence. Cassava that's been exported like this will have gone through checks because it naturally contains compounds that can turn into cyanide.
Poison cases are very rare, but export markets require proof that the plant was processed safely. For exports, you do need a certificate of analysis. And to get that, the average smallholder farmer cannot afford, because it costs at least £100, to send a sample to the laboratory for testing. And even the capacity of the laboratories within the country may not be sufficient for a whole load of stakeholders.
These checks aren't the only barrier to exports for Nigerian farmers. Here's Chiodozi Egesi from the National Root Crops Research Institute again. Export will happen when you have stabilised your production and you have your production going very well. So because the production has not come to that level of efficiency, export markets have not taken off.
The farmers and the processors need to be trained on quality standards that are needed. For example, cassava is 80% wastewater and 20 to 30% dry weight, typically. I'm just speaking typically, it varies. So you need to take away that water efficiently and you need to take it away thoroughly. How long does a cassava last after it comes out of the ground?
The post-harvest chef life is not more than 36, 48 hours. So you don't have long to process it? No, no, no. You need to produce near the factory gate or a short distance to the factory gate. And there needs to be a quick turnover. That's also a big issue for the smallholders, how they travel on bad roads to transport their cassava. And then
There's also an issue about cost and competitiveness. So the government of Nigeria needs to balance the trade of importing alternatives, you know, products like starch and all of that versus the ones that they produce in Nigeria. That is always going to come into play. Maximising the cassava crop is something Nigeria's politicians, investors and entrepreneurs have puzzled over for years.
One man hoping to have cracked it is the boss of Niji Group. Based in Oyo State, western Nigeria, it has what he calls the Complete Value Chain, a mechanised 4,000-acre cassava farm making products for domestic and export markets, alongside a tractor factory and a training centre for prospective farmers.
My name is Kola Wale Adeniji, but I'd like to introduce myself as farmer Kola Wale Adeniji. Why is that? A lot of people in Africa don't really appreciate the work of farmers. In Africa, people don't look at farming as a good career, so I decided to change the narratives. You have farmers working your land you consider a community. Yes. How does that actually work?
How big is the community of farmers?
Who are leasing land from you? There are over 100 now. And you're hoping to grow this community? Yeah, we're hoping to grow the community because we find out that the best way for us to develop agriculture in Nigeria is by engaging in community whereby all of them have farms in an area together. So share services. We allow the cost of production to go down.
Do you think this model is the way forward for smallholder farming in Nigeria? This model is not only the way forward in Nigeria, but it's the way forward in Africa for us to do farming effectively. For smallholder farmers, this model means giving up ownership and oversight in favour of stability and an assured income.
Not all will follow, but Dr Louise Abayomi from the Natural Resources Institute believes it's businesses like Niji Group that will drive the export market forward. It's the private sector that are taking charge of this. So they see an opportunity, they organise farmers and they give technical assistance. So they might advise them on good agricultural practices and things like this. So it takes time to build up.
What if I said to you, the average smallholder farmer is managing generally to support their family and there are millions of smallholder farmers who have some land they own and they live off their land.
Is that an inherently problematic situation? Does that situation need to change? They're becoming more vulnerable because with the population growth comes pressure on land. And apart from that, there are some conflicts going on. And so already the amount of land available is reducing. So there's more people, less land available.
and the productivity per unit area isn't getting better necessarily. So in your view, it's a necessity that production is improved in Nigeria? It is a necessity because it's a staple.
It's a resilient crop. It's the only thing that can stay in the ground until you're ready to pull it out. Whether you're pulling it out to eat or whether you're pulling it out to pay for someone's school fees or a hospital bill. And it is indigenous and it's the cheapest thing going relative to the other commodities that we have available to eat in the country. It makes sense. Yes, it makes sense. I mean, it's a brilliant crop. For the smallholder farmers planning to stay put, there are also big plans.
Dr. Mustafa Bakano, president of the Nigerian Cassava Growers Association, recently called out what he called Nigeria's neglect of cassava. He's now helping to organize better seed material and access to processing machines by putting farms into clusters that are more likely to get loans to pay for them.
But one area he can't control is pricing, because cassava products compete with imports such as wheat flour and starch. He describes the most recent price shock to hit cassava farmers.
It has become terrible because most of our farmers have taken loans and then some of us who have actually took some resources from other people to help them are actually falling at a loss because recently we meant to understand there's a serious glut in the market. And of course, why? Because they have imported so much starch to an extent that our farmers are now hell-bent on breaking down the cost and then selling at a loss, which is very, very devastating.
And why are people importing starch rather than buying it from the domestic market? I think it's a policy issue. It's a policy issue. It has to do with the licensing, probably, the approach the government wants to do in terms of bringing down the cost of prices. But then the government needs to really understand the dynamics to see whether it is really working.
We first need to know who are the farmers and then do a proper mapping for their farmlands. By the time we are able to identify their farmlands, we are able to know what exactly is it they need and what exactly is the challenges.
So one of the major challenges for farmers, I think what I've realised is the ability to have a processing site close to the farms. My closerization concept is that you can cluster at least 200 hectares, anything within 200 hectares, and then you can have processing plants that can just process just 20 tonnes or 30 tonnes per day. So any time you cultivate, you can process in a day. How long is all this going to take?
I think the future in the next five years should be looking very, very prosperous if I am allowed by the system to implement this new framework that I have developed. I'm looking at up to 10 years to have a sufficiency in terms of the processing plants across the country. But in the meantime, I call it the medium-term plan. We're looking at having it in the regions first.
The whole six geopolitical zones of the country, which I hope this will be the legacy that I will do in my first term. So we are hoping that we're going to have massive production and then massive processing within those places by 2029. The potential for Kusaba to provide food and financial security for Nigeria doesn't seem to be in doubt, nor do some of the ways to achieve it. But aggregating millions of independent farmers is a gargantuan task.
And it's barely begun. Professor Lateef Sani is optimistic. Number one, mechanization. Number two, disease-resistant, virus-free varieties. Cassava is an engine of growth. Cassava is a facetite crop.
Cassava can help food security. And if everybody works together, farmers, processors, marketers, are assured that they will have opportunity of making more money from cassava and enhancing their livelihood. I'm Laura Heighton-Gins. You've been listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. To get in touch with the programme, email us on businessdaily at bbc.co.uk.
You're not at your house. You're at a lavish seaside estate.
You're not walking the dog. You're hunting for clues in an Agatha Christie mystery. See it differently with BritBox. Stream an endlessly entertaining collection of British TV, including new original series, Ludwig, starring David Mitchell. A bit awkward, really. I think I might just have solved a murder. And outrageous, a scandalous true story. Seems there's a political extremist in every family these days. See it differently when you stream the best of British TV with BritBox.