Posted on September, 2, 2022 at 08:58 am
BUSIA COUNTY, Kenya — On a July midmorning, Jennifer Maasai, a 62-year-old small-scale farmer, inspected her cassava farm below the rocky Akites Hills, in Kenya’s Busia County, not far from the border with Uganda. The rains in her county have been good this season. Her six-acre cassava crop in various stages swayed gently to the wind, looking green and healthy, and the neat rows stretched from the foot of Akites Hills to the road below.
Maasai used to plant cassava for food and as a cash crop but stopped because of how disease and poor yields had decimated production on her farm, making it untenable. “There was hunger in this area because here cassava is our main food,” she said.
Cassava production in Kenya dropped in the nineties and early 2000s due to diseases, unavailability of clean seeds, poor varieties, and agronomical practices. In a bid to change this, the government, development organizations, and research institutions started addressing these three issues.
Cassava and other roots and tubers have now been recommended to complement maize, wheat, and rice, which have been heavily relied on. Though production is not yet at its peak, farmers in Kenya’s western and coastal regions have started embracing cassava production again after many years.
Self Help Africa, with funding from the European Union, has been running a program to improve the cassava value chain from production to marketing and policy. At the production stage, they are focusing on Kenya’s western and coastal regions, where they work together with the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization, or KALRO, which produces clean seeds, and Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service, which certifies the quality of seeds produced.
Cassava diseases were spread by the cross-border exchange of seeds and caused a total loss of yields to farmers to a point that farmers in the region switched to growing sorghum, maize, and millet for their starch, Samson Khachina, the county director of agriculture in Busia said.
But KALRO moved in to help farmers to get seed varieties that yield higher, mature faster, and are tolerant to pests and diseases, Isabella Omemwa, a cassava researcher at KALRO in Kakamega, said.
Thousands of farmers in Kenya have since had access to clean seeds and production has improved. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, production was 571,845 metric tons in 2015 and increased to 945,826 metric tons in 2018. It attributed the increase to access to clean seeds. Khachina said his county is now the biggest producer in the country, producing 222,713 tonnes in 2018.
Peter Okoth, senior programs manager at Self Help Africa, said they chose cassava because it is drought-resistant, important in food security, and presents multiple opportunities for producers through value addition. He said more farmers in the country and the region should embrace cassava cultivation.
“In a country like Kenya, one hectare of land produces on average between 5 to 10 tons of fresh tubers depending on the location in the country. Though improved varieties of cassava are ready for harvest in 8 to 12 months while maize takes around four months, in the long run, cassava farmers have more to eat than maize farmers, who harvest sooner. Cassava, unlike maize, is highly drought tolerant and can grow in semi-arid areas with little rain,” Okoth said.
In Africa and across the globe, there is an overdependence on maize, rice, and wheat. However, a study conducted last year found that wheat and maize production will be increasingly impaired by ecological drivers such as land degradation, water scarcity, and climate change. Like many other countries in Africa, Kenya depends on maize as a staple. In 2021, Kenyans consumed 3.8 million metric tons of maize.
But the productivity of maize has been affected by adverse climatic conditions and other factors, pushing the prices up. In January this year, the permanent Secretary for Agriculture Hamadi Boga said that the government was predicting between 30% to 70% drop in maize production in marginal areas in Kenya. Over the course of this year alone, maize flour prices have doubled to 210 Kenya shillings ($2) per two-kilogram packet. Kenya also imports wheat from Ukraine and in 2021, it imported $78.26 million worth of wheat and meslin. The war has led to an increase in the prices of wheat products including wheat flour. As the costs of these grains increase, many people living below the poverty line can’t afford them, resulting in increasing hunger levels.
Kenya’s National Root and Tuber Crops Strategy recommends roots and tubers with high nutritional values to fill in “the niche for providing alternative source of carbohydrates and other nutrients to cereals.”
Kenya is working on a flour-blending regulation that will require flour millers to blend their maize flour with 10% of flour from other underutilized crops such as cassava, millet, sorghum, or amaranth. Okoth said that, unlike wheat, barley, and rye flours, cassava is also gluten-free, giving it an added advantage.
“Cassava flour is also suited for people with wheat allergies like hay fever At the moment, some millers are doing 0.4% blend of cassava in the maize flour but we are proposing a 10% as informed by a survey we did which indicated that consumers prefer their flour blended,” he said.
Source: Devex