Business
Cassava Value Chain Development: Centre Hails Taraba
As the ‘Cassava Plus’ project gradually winds down, the
Taraba Government has received commendation for pioneering the development of
the cassava value chain.
Cassava Plus is a public-private partnership to
commercialise cassava production by linking farmers to value-added markets. The
three-year project (2010-2012) is being financed by the Schokland Fund,
established by the Netherlands’ Directorate-General for International
Cooperation .
The project is being implemented by International Centre for
Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC) and the Dutch Agricultural
Development and Trading Company (DADTCO), a private enterprise specialising in
large volume commercial agricultural products with high trade potential.
The aim of Cassava Plus is to strengthen the market
capacities of 164,000 cassava farmers in Nigeria.
A statement issued by the IFDC and made available to The
Tide in Abuja on Sunday, commended the Taraba Government for promoting
smallholder cassava farmers in the state to key into the project.
It said that the project had been working with producers,
agricultural extension agents, input dealers/service providers and marketers,
including about 1,500 cassava producers comprising 52 farmer groups in the
state.
The Tide reports that cassava is one of the target crops
that the Federal Government is working toward harnessing their full potential
under the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA).
The Federal Government is currently driving the
implementation of the inclusion of 10 per cent cassava flour in bread with a
view to reducing the huge foreign exchange spent on the importation of wheat.
The statement noted that the Taraba Government had since
2009, worked with the IFDC to support its farmers by increasing accessibility
and affordability to agricultural inputs, improving dissemination of
agricultural extension messages to farmers and linking producers to markets
such as DADTCO.
Established in 2002, DADTCO has a wide experience working
with farmers in the developing world, supplying them with agricultural inputs,
and selling their produce in domestic and export markets.
DADTCO has its headquarters in the Netherlands with
subsidiaries in Nigeria and Mozambique
According to the statement, not less than 1,000 farmers
involved in the Cassava Plus project received subsidised fertiliser through
trained agro-dealers while 500 others also bought improved cassava stem
varieties.
Furthermore, the IFDC, under the project, facilitated the
training of a total of 1,500 farmers in best agronomic practices and also
monitored them to ensure the adoption of modern methods in their farming
activities.
DADTCO also designed an Automobile Processing Unit (AMPU), a
“factory on wheels” to target smallholder cassava farmers in the state, the
statement said.