[Cassava] NEPAD Pan Africa Cassava Initiative (NPACI)

["G.Mersadier" <g.mersadier@fidafrique.net>]

From NEPAD DIALOGUE - Online Weekly - English Edition {Issue 170 - 6 
March 2007} www.nepad.org/2005/files/newsletterarchive.php

NEPAD sees cassava as Africa’s poverty fighter

The W.K.Kellog Foundation has given a grant of US$599,800 to the 
International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to promote the 
NEPAD Pan Africa Cassava Initiative (NPACI) for sustainable economic 
growth, food security and poverty alleviation in Africa. The grant will 
help the NEPAD/IITA unit that has been established at the Chitedze 
Research Station in Malawi.

NEPAD’s Pan African Cassava Initiative has adopted the theme “Cassava - 
a poverty fighter in Africa” -- the goal of the initiative being to tap 
the enormous potential of cassava for food security and income generation.

The philosophy is that production of cassava will be viable and 
sustainable if it is driven by market forces. Production, technology 
generation and development are expected to respond simultaneously to the 
market pull.

During 1997/98 a severe drought devastated maize farms, putting 27 
million people in Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Swaziland, Tanzania, and 
Zambia at high risk of severe food shortage.

IITA in response started to promote the production of cassava, a drought 
tolerant crop, to reduce the risk associated with the dependency on maize.

Through the Cassava Initiative, NEPAD intends to scale-up local, 
national and regional interventions for better impact in rural and 
peri-urban communities. One such intervention is in the Nkhotaka 
district in Malawi with a project to improve rural livelihoods through 
cassava commercialisation, funded by USAID.

In Katimba village, in the Nkhotakota district, farmers now produce 
cassava with yields of 22 t/ha.

Working through the Southern Africa Root Crops Research Network 
(SARRNET) and in collaboration with the national program, IITA initiated 
the Masinda Cassava Club in the village as a pilot processing centre to 
turn cassava into industrial starch. This was aimed at adding value to 
cassava production in the village. After one year the Club sold about 40 
Mt of starch, worth over US$20,000.

The current demand for industrial starch is greater than the supply and 
the initiative has created a market pull for cassava farmers in the 
neighbouring villages.

Prior to the establishment of the processing plant, the cassava roots 
had no real monetary value, apart from being a food surplus. Starch 
processing and the need for transportation of fresh tuberous roots from 
the fields to the factory have had a marked impact on rural livelihoods, 
as well as creating employment.

Farmers are now making more than US$ 800 from just one hectare of fresh 
cassava sold to the group and this income has affected the livelihoods 
of all farmers in this poor rural community.