In today's article,we will be talking about how cassava has become a part and parcel of the African meal and how Africa cannot do without it
Currently, about half of the world
production of cassava is in Africa. Cassava is cultivated in around 40 African
countries, stretching through a wide belt from Madagascar in the Southeast to
Senegal and to Cape Verde in the Northwest. Around 70 percent of Africa's
cassava output is harvested in Nigeria, the Congo and Tanzania (IFAD and FAO,
2000). Throughout the forest and transition zones of Africa, cassava is either
a primary staple or a secondary food staple. There's even a song praising cassava in Africa, did you know before?
.
Due to poverty and a lack of foreign exchange, Africa's
net cereal imports are expected to remain low (Pinstrup-Anderson et al., 2000).
Therefore, the urgent challenge before African nations is to increase domestic
food production. Cassava is Africa's second most important food staple
in terms of per capita 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 Congo, cassava
contributes more than 1 000 calories per person per day to the average diet and
many families eat cassava for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Cassava has the potential to
increase farm incomes, reduce rural and urban poverty and help close the food
gap. Without question, cassava holds great promise for feeding Africa's growing
population. Cassava can be produced with family labour, land and a hoe and
machete, making it an attractive and low-risk crop for poor farmers. Also,
cassava is available to low-income rural households in the form of simple food
products (for example, dried roots and leaves) which are significantly cheaper
than grains such as rice, maize and wheat. Similarly, urban households in many
parts of West Africa consume cassava in the form of gari (Nweke et al., 2001).
Cassava has several other advantages
over rice, maize and other grains as a food staple in areas where there is a
degraded resource base, uncertain rainfall and weak market infrastructure. It
is drought tolerant; this attribute makes it the most suitable food crop during
periods of drought and famine.Cassava has historically played an
important famine-prevention role in Eastern and Southern Africa where maize is
the preferred food staple and drought is a recurrent problem.
However, cassava has been neglected for
numerous reasons by researchers, African policy-makers and by most donor and
international agencies. Cassava is a marginalized crop in food policy debates
and burdened with the stigma of being an inferior food, ill suited and
uncompetitive with the glamour crops such as imported rice and wheat because of
several long-standing myths and half-truths. Many food policy analysts consider
cassava as an inferior food because it is assumed that its per capita
consumption will decline with increasing per capita incomes (Nweke et al.,
2001). It is we, the Africans,who know more practically and experiencially how beneficial cassava is,therefore, let's rise up and welcome with open arms the saviour of Africa,because cassava has come to stay!!!
