Rivers Begins Construction Of 15,000tons Cassava Plant, Wednesday

(R-L): Speaker House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal, Rivers State Governor, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, Sokoto State Governor, Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko and Deputy Speaker of House of Representatives, Emeka Ihedioha, at the joint convocation ceremony of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto; where Amaech, Tambuwal and Wamakko were honoured with Doctorate Degrees, at the weekend.

The ground breaking ceremony for the construction of a 15,000 tons capacity cassava processing factory under the Rivers State Cassava Initiative will take place on Wednesday, December 5 2012 at Afam in Oyigbo Local Government Area.

The event which would be performed by Governor Rotimi Amaechi would have the Ambassador of the Netherlands, Bert J. Ronhaar, and cassava experts from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in attendance.

The Rivers State Cassava Initiative is a public private partnership between the Rivers State Government (represented by the Rivers State Sustainable Development Agency – RSSDA), the Dutch Agricultural Development and Trading Company (DADTCO), International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC), Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) and Stanbic IBTC Bank.

The Initiative is intended to promote an increase in cassava yield of small holder farmers and value chain in the state from the current average production of 10 tons per hectare to about 20 tons per hectare, and thereby double their income on the same size of land.

Farmers will be paid on the spot for their produce, and through this process helped out of poverty as market for their produce was already guaranteed.

Nigeria is the highest producer of cassava in the world with over 45 million tons production per annum, but has failed to take economic advantage of this unique position. Rivers State sits at the centre of the cassava belt in the country with thousands of small holder farmers engaged in its cultivation.

One of the major advantages of the project is the introduction of DADTCO’s split processing technology through which the Autonomous Mobile Processing Units (AMPU) will process cassava roots into cassava cake. The cassava cake will subsequently be processed into high quality cassava flour at the Afam cassava processing factory.