IITA DG calls for a “Brown Revolution” for a “Green Revolution” in Africa

The push for a “Green Revolution” in Africa to increase agricultural production for food and economic development will not bear much fruit if adequate attention is not paid to managing soil fertility in the continent.  

Dr Sanginga making a presentation on Brown Revolution at the
 Global Cassava Partnership conference in Kampala, Uganda.

According to Dr Nteranya Sanginga, IITA Director General, Africa cannot achieve a “Green Revolution” without first having a “Brown Revolution”. He noted that the current application of 8 kg/ha of soil nutrients, whether organic or inorganic fertilizers, was very low and was a major setback to the continent’s vision of adequately feeding itself.

Dr Sanginga spoke at the Global Cassava Partnership meeting currently taking place this week in Kampala, Uganda, that brought together over 400 international scientists from all over the world to strategize on how cassava can play a bigger role in economic development by exploiting the diverse uses of this hardy crop. Cassava performs well under harsh conditions, such as poor soils and drought.

The conference was launched by the Honourble Minister of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, Hon Tress Bucyanayandi who noted that frequent droughts and floods as a result of climate change were one of the leading causes of food insecurity in the world today with millions of USD going into emergency food aid.

The Guest of honour Hon Tess Bucyanayandi makes
the opening remarks. 

He noted that cassava was a crop that performs well in drought conditions and is becoming an important food security crop. He therefore urged the researchers gathered at the conference to develop solutions to some of the challenges facing the production of the crop in the region such as Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) and Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD), the two diseases wreaking havoc on the crop’s production. 

Participants following workshop proceedings

Dr Eugene Terry from Transfarm Africa noted that a number of efforts to transform cassava were already underway in the region starting with the development and deployment of improved better yielding varieties by IITA. He noted that over 80% of the new varieties released by national programs in Africa had incorporated these varieties released in the 1970’s and dubbed TMS series.

He said there were many challenges facing the transformation of the crop that needed to be tackled through research including control of pests and diseases and the need for early maturing and drought tolerant varieties. On marketing issues, he said there was need to research on better organization of value chains, better infrastructure support and how to reduce transaction costs.

Dr Sanginga on his part told the conference participants that while much investment had gone into developing high-yielding cassava varieties that were resistant to some of the major pests and diseases, the gains achieved cannot be realized if these varieties are grown in poor soils.

He said it was unfortunate that cassava had been tagged for many years as a poor man’s crop that does not require much input such as fertilizers. He argued that the crop harvested as much nutrients from the soil as other crops and that these nutrients needed to be replenished. It also requires nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium similar to other crops.

“Nutrient use in cassava has been very minimal as it is considered a poor man’s crop. However, if we are talking about cassava transformation, about increasing cassava production not only for food but also for commercial use, we must change these wrong perceptions. If we think of growing cassava in soils that are too poor for other crops such as maize,” he said, “then, we are missing the other half of the equation.”

The African Union has recommended for the countries in the continent to increase application of soil nutrients to 50 kg/ha of nutrients combining both organic and inorganic fertilizers.

The Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century (GCP21) conference is taking place on 18–22 June 2012 in Kampala, Uganda. GCP21 consists of 45 member institutions working on research and development of cassava, a staple crop relied on by more than 700 million people worldwide. The ultimate goal of the partnership is to improve cassava productivity through scientific research and development. 

Group photo of participants

The conference participants include representatives from NARS, international agricultural research centers, advanced laboratories and universities from developed and developing countries, United Nations’ agencies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, donor and development organizations, businesses in the ag-biotechnology and food processing industries.

Sanginga drums up support for IITA’s Southern Africa hub

 The IITA Director General, Dr Nteranya Sanginga, was last week, from 11 – 15 June 2012, in Zambia, to meet different partners of the institute to explore ways to strengthen relationships and support each other in efforts to find solutions to hunger and poverty in the country and beyond.

IITA DG (extreme left) talks to Dr Mick Mwala, Dean of School of Agricultural
Sciences. At the centre is Dr Chikoye, IITA Director for Southern Africa 

The partners welcomed the move by IITA to invest in first class research facilities and increase the number and diversity of scientists working in Lusaka, Zambia, its regional hub for Southern Africa and serving 13 countries in the region

Meeting with AfDB team

The hub is one of four that the institute is working through as it decentralizes its activities to have more impact as part of its ambitious plan to get 20 million people out of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa in the next ten years as spelt out in its refreshed strategy. 


The hubs are in Nigeria for the West, Tanzania for Eastern, Zambia for Southern and Democratic Republic of Congo for Central Africa.

Tackling succession crisis in agricultural research
Sanginga said the institute was going to especially focus on building capacity of researchers from national research institutes and institutions of higher learning.

He noted that many countries in Africa were heading towards a crisis as the current experienced civil servants in the agricultural sector who were retiring did not have qualified predecessors to take over. 

At a media briefing

“In Zambia, in Congo, in Kenya and in many other African countries, the situation is the same. We have scientists at the prime of their career being forced to retire because they have attained retirement age of 50 – 55 years. On the other hand, there are very few experienced staff to take over from them. So at IITA we are exploring how to make use of the knowledge and skills of these retirees and how to build the capacity of young researchers and attract the young people to agriculture,” he said.

This was welcomed by the Acting Director of ZARI Dr Moses Mwale and the Dean of the School of Faculty of Agriculture Sciences, University of Zambia, Dr Mick Mwala and their colleagues.

Crop diversification

Visiting a tissue culture lab at Zambian Agricultural Research Institute

Dr Sanginga also noted that there was need for African countries to diversify their staple crops particularly to avoid over reliance on maize. This was supported by country representatives of FAO, Mr Adrianus Spijker and Africa Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Freddie Kwesiga who noted that over-reliance on maize as a food staple and income crop in Zambia was not sustainable particularly in the face of climate change and dependency on rain-fed agriculture.

They identified cassava as one crop they were keen on promoting as it was a hardy crop with uses that went beyond just being a food crop.

Dr Sanginga assured them that IITA had many years of working along the cassava value chain and would lend its expertise to support the country in its diversification efforts.

He gave an example of Nigeria where the policy of including 20% cassava flour was saving the country millions of US dollars from reduced wheat importation and was creating jobs for thousands of young people.

Sanginga giving a talk at the University of Zambia, School of
Agricultural Sciences

FAO country representative, Mr Spijker noted that IITA and FAO had achieved significant success in dealing with Cassava Mosaic Diseases (CMD) in DRC. He said IITA’s new disease-resistant varieties distributed all over the country, with support from FAO and other partners, had averted a major disaster. He was therefore more than happy to collaborate with IITA to make a difference in Zambia.

A group photo with students and faculty members

Sanginga said the institute was also focusing on strengthening its research on Natural Resource Management, and partnership with National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) for better impact.   

Sanginga was accompanied by the IITA director for Southern Africa, David Chikoye and Steve Boahen, and Alene Arega, the Country representatives for Mozambique and Malawi respectively.

In his short busy program in Zambia, Sanginga also made brief presentations at the University of Zambia, at the FAO offices, had a media briefing in addition to holding a meeting with all IITA staff in Zambia.  

Work smart not hard - Boosting productivity of small-holder farmers through smarter farming practices

A man and his wife who are small-holder farmers, display their harvest of cassava and banana, two important staples in Sub-Sahara Africa. 

They have small farms, big families and few animals. They grow different types of crops to spread their risks and lack resources to invest in inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides to boost their production. They are at the mercy of the weather; when it rains their harvest is abundant, when it fails, their granaries are empty and they sometimes require food aid.

These are the small-holder farmers in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda that Dr. Piet Van Asten, a system's agronomist with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is trying to work with to ensure they get the most out of what they have. However, they represent a majority of small-holder farmers in Africa.
He works for the Consortium for improving agriculture based livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) which brings together many partners to improve the livelihoods of small-holder farmers. IITA is one of the founding partners.

Too many challenges, where does one start? According to Van Asten, the starting point to improve the productivity of their farming systems is to understand their constraints and to try and identify the one or two issues that if tackled can have great positive impact. He says using tools such as yield gap analysis which looks at the actual productivity of the small holders farmers against the maximum yield they can get in the same circumstances, they have been able to make some headway.

Poor old soils

Dr Piet Van Asten, IITA systems agronomist. 

Van Asten says, focusing primarily on banana, they have established that poor soils are one of the most important constraints to the crop's production by the small-holder farmers in the three countries. Most soils, he said, were old, from old parent rocks and had very little nutrients left.


It therefore follows logically that supporting the farmers to use inputs such as fertilizer was one of the best-bet technologies to increase their production. However, Van Asten cautions, this must be applied based on the actual soil deficiency and include factors such as distance from the farms to market and banana prices.

"Investing in fertilizer does not always lead to profits for the farmers. They can only get value for their money if they live near markets or infrastructure is good and they are able to fetch good prices for their banana. They must also know which nutrients their soils are lacking and which are important for the crops they are growing. They should not follow blanket recommendations as is always the case," he said.

For example he said, they established that potassium, which plays a big role in banana production, was lacking in most soils in the three countries. Yet, the addition of the mineral led to great gains in banana production. Furthermore, Van Asten said, the banana plants that received adequate potassium fared better in times of drought.

He says the impact of adding nutrients to the soils was visible even at the farm level where bananas growing near the homesteads were healthier than those further down.

"This is because the soil closer to the homestead benefited from kitchen wastes as women tend not to walk far to throw away the rubbish. For example, ashes from the fire add calcium to the soils, "he said. "Food wastes add organic matter."

Banana growing near a homestead where the soil is often more fertile from kitchen waste 

.

Which crops give the highest returns?

Most African farmers practice mixed farming. The question therefore arises, with the little limited resources at their disposal, which crop would give them the highest return from fertilizer application and how do they make these decisions?

Van Asten says according to a scooping study they carried out in the three countries, they were surprised to discover that farmers would get the highest return from coffee, cassava and banana and not maize and beans which they gave preference.

"Coffee, banana and even cassava in the long run proved to be better value for money invested in fertilizer in terms of replenishing nutrient extracted in the soils and returns per dollar invested. However, farmers only see the immediate gains in maize and beans.

"Farmers still have to make the decision carefully because for example, once they start fertilizing their coffee it would be best if they can continue. If they stop, the coffee can't maintain its canopy and yields and will show some die-back. This fuels farmers' belief that fertilizer is bad and spoils soils," he said.

Coffee and banana - super mix

Coffee and banana intercrop. 

Other practices that were found to increase yield include inter-cropping banana and coffee. Piet says the farmers got more out of their land by growing the two crops together than having either of them alone. These findings he said are slowing leading to a change of hearts among policy makers who have for a long time preached mono-cropping of coffee in Rwanda and Burundi. This is because coffee is an import foreign exchange earner and they did not want anything to affect its production.

He said their research was not inventing anything new. Rather it was based on finding out what the best farmers were doing to get their good yields and helping the others to adopt them.

"Some of the best banana farmers get as much as 40 tons per hectare. We try to understand what they are doing and why, and then promote it to wider farmers in the community and even further," he said.

However, he says they don't always agree with the farmers views. For example, most farmers judge the productivity of their banana by the size of the bunches.

"To us, this is not the best indicator. We instead look at productivity per hectare. A farmer may have smaller bunches but more plants therefore his overall productivity is higher than the one with huge bunches but fewer plants. We therefore have been working with them to plant as many bananas as their land can accommodate based on its soil fertility, rainfall, among others" he said.

Piet says under CIALCA they have mapped most of the soils in the three countries and developed fertilizer usage recommendations that are region specific. They have also developed and are disseminating the rich information gathered on various ways that small-holder farmers can increase banana production. The crop is among their most important food and cash crop in the three countries but its productivity is very low.

Group riding high, thanks to an old friend, cassava

“With the money I made from the sale of my cassava roots and stem (as planting material) and the dividends I received from the group, I have now finished constructing a video den, purchased a TV and a DVD player, and installed a solar system to power them. I will be charging the villagers a small fee to watch news and movies,” Peter Mtoi, 61 year old shows us his latest acquisition with pride.


By his side, his wife, Mary Mtoi, 51, adds that they have also purchased a commercial charcoal oven to bake bread and cakes made of mixed cassava and wheat flour to sell to the village and nearby shopping centre.

The Mtois living in Tongwe village in Bagamoyo District, Pwani region are members of a local cassava farmers group, Wambato (Wakulima wa mhogo Bagamoyo Tongwe) which has been processing cassava into flour thereby getting more income as compared to the sale of fresh roots.

Ten years ago, things were very different and they had almost given up growing cassava following its devastation by the cassava brown streak (CBSD) which causes a dry rot in the tubers rendering them useless – they are not edible nor can they be milled into flour. All their local varieties were susceptible to the rot disease and they were desperate.

The Roots and Tuber programme of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Cooperatives introduced and tested together with the farmers six varieties growing elsewhere that had shown good levels of resistance to the disease.

‘Out of the six varieties they brought us for testing, we found Kiroba to the best. It was high yielding, resistant to the disease and sweet,’ Mtoi said.

They were also trained on good agronomical practices to get maximum yield such as when and how to plant, spacing and selection of good planting material. Soon the group was back to the cassava growing business.

Cassava cassava everywhere


However, following the rapid adoption of Kiroba and better farming practices, there was now more cassava than the markets could absorb, prices plummeted and the farmers were in despair again.

The Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) came to their rescue and constructed a processing centre equipped with simple machines to process cassava into flour which has a longer shelf life and fetches more money than the highly perishable fresh cassava roots which start to rot three days after harvesting. To show its commitment, the group purchased the bricks and provide labour for the construction.

From 2009, the group has been receiving support from the Unleashing the Power of the Cassava in Africa (UPOCA) of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in tackling emerging challenges to take their production to a higher level.

In 2009 the project trained Tabu Maghembe, the government extension officer working with the group and selected representatives on production of high quality cassava flour and new products and recipes using the flour; quality and safety management, and labelling, packaging and marketing.

The group warmly welcomed and implemented all the new ideas received on their own costs. It has since constructed a toilet at the centre, raised the racks for drying the cassava to avoid contamination by dust or domestic animals, and started using plastic bags to spread the cassava chips to dry.

‘As you can see we have notices for everyone to wash their hands before touching anything as per the hygiene quality and standards training, ‘Maghembe said. “We are working towards getting our flour certified by the Tanzania Bureau of Standards.”


A credit scheme

The group has a bank account and pays dividends to its members twice a year from some of the profits made. It also buys their cassava for processing and pays them a daily wage for their labour during processing. The neighbouring community is also benefiting from a ready and better priced market for their cassava.

It also acts as a saving and credit society for both members and surrounding farmers who borrow money for emergencies against the cassava in the field. Once they harvest it, they sell it to the group to repay the loan with a small interest.

One challenge for the group is transporting their dried cassava chips over long distances for milling. The mills are also not exclusive for cassava products and the flour is sometimes contaminated with maize and other grains flour. John Msemo, UPOCA country Mananger says the project will purchase a milling machine for the group and they construct the building to house it.

For the group, this is just but the begining:‘We are ready to continue to grow from strength to strength. We started from the farm and now we are processing and selling to supermarkets in big towns. We are now eyeing markets outside the country,’ said Maghembe.