About the Cassava Carp
The project is aimed at enhancing sustainable production, processing and marketing of cassava and cassava products among the smallholder cassava farming communities. Specifically, the project is focusing on production of virus-free (clean) cassava planting material, appropriate agronomic practices for production intensification. The primary entry point is to ensure access to virus-free and good quality cassava planting material of farmer preferred and elite varieties. Through existing multi-stakeholder innovation platforms, farmers and other actors are being engaged in each of the four pilot study districts, where cassava plays vital roles of food security and source of income. The focus districts include Kole and Apac (Northern Uganda), and Serere and Bukedea (Eastern Uganda); and some R4D activities at Makerere University Agricultural Plant Tissue Culture Laboratory at Kabanyolo. The project identified some key challenges facing cassava production, processing and marketing in the study areas. Some challenges incited investigative research topics for students while others are key areas of incubating business ideas with university graduates. Through community knowledge workers, the project is engaging the communities in solving their challenges while sometimes providing direct support in terms of basic materials. The project is evaluating planting material, bioethanol, high quality flour, and composite porridge flour as key value chains for improvement. To this effect the project identified and virus-cleaned at least one farmer preferred cassava variety in each community. Mother gardens have been established consisting of clean and elite varieties in Apac, Kole, Serere and Bukedea districts. The project is also building human resource capacity in research at 1 PhD and MSc levels as well as supporting incubation of business ideas and BSc student research topics along the cassava value chains. The project team works with farmers to generate and diffuse knowledge on integrated crop management, processing and marketing of cassava products. Many expected outcomes of the project will directly impact on the rural communities especially those involved in cassava production and associated value chains. This project is part of the Community Action Research Programme (CARP) of the Regional Universities Forum (RUFORUM).
More On Cassava
In Uganda, cassava is an important starch staple and is the most important root crop where 74% of farming households grow the crop on a subsistence level. In addition, cassava has a range of industrial uses such as starch, ethanol and biofuels, animal feed supplementation, which give it huge potential to be transformed from a purely subsistence food crop to a commercial crop, spur rural industrial development and raise rural incomes. Production of cassava requires low agricultural inputs and allows flexible harvesting time whereby a farmer only harvests roots needed at that time. Cassava is particularly suited in fighting poverty because of its efficient production of calories per unit land, even under low rainfall and poor soil fertility conditions where other crops may fail. Its high yield and carbohydrate content has made it particularly a good substitute for wheat flour and corn starch in industrial manufacture.
Cassava production in Uganda is greatly limited by diseases, particularly cassava mosaic disease (CMD) and cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) that cause severe yield losses (. The viral diseases problems are aggravated by lack of an efficient seed system for sustainable production and delivery of quality planting material. Moreover, these diseases have insect vectors which increase the rate of re-infection in the growing seasons upon availability of inoculum and favourable environment. Management of these viral diseases through controlling the vectors is technically not feasible in tropical areas especially within the context of subsistence cropping systems. The rapid rates of re-infection, especially for susceptible varieties, are responsible for cultivar degeneration and abandonment of once elite varieties. This situation is likely to worsen due to poor farmer extension education, slow progress in breeding new resistant varieties, and lack of regulated regimes for movement of planting materials. In Uganda, yields are between 8.0 and 12.0 t/ha, compared to 25 t/ha reported on research stations. This is partly as a result of a misconception by farmers that cassava does not require soil fertility supplementation, and also because of low returns to cassava compared to other crops using the more nutrient rich soils. Subsequently, farmers increasingly target low fertility soils for growing cassava especially when land pressure increases. Because of the low yields, utilization of cassava is limited largely to subsistence levels and thus making cassava less competitive as a commercial crop especially in areas that are prone to the myriad of viral diseases. Timely availability of quality planting material is reckoned as a key requisite for improving crop production and productivity. In general, good quality planting material reduces risks of pests and diseases and increases yields, and thus can make cassava production business more viable for farmers to invest in. This would then raise the need for better market linkages and outlets. It is therefore envisaged that increasing the competiveness of cassava production through use of quality planting material, specialty starch quality varieties, appropriate agronomy and processing technologies, can subsequently lead to increased demand for planting material. Such a scenario could attract private sector investment and lead to development of a sustainable seed system.