Can't do without

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?

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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!!!