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New MEDA project to boost Tanzania cassava production You can’t go far among the millions of subsistence farmers in Tanzania without encountering cassava. The starchy tuber, also known as yuca and manioc, is an important source of food and income in most rural households. But cassava has fallen on hard times. Outbreaks of viral diseases have infected and destroyed plantings over large areas, creating a nutritional and economic crisis for the 80 percent of the population engaged in agriculture. In a sector where plantings have normally been handed down, field-to-field, there is currently no effective commercial way to replenish supplies of new disease‑resistant stock. A new MEDA project aims to address this crisis and boost long-term food security by rebuilding the fractured cassava chain. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the five-year project aims to dis-
seminate new disease-resistant varieties and make them commercially available to 62,000 subsistence farmers. A key to its impact will be to pilot supply chain models to bridge the gap between the research laboratories developing new varieties, and the farmers looking for new planting material, says Lauren Good, who administers the project from MEDA’s new office in Washington, DC. “We are working with two of the leading research stations in this first year to grow clean foundation seed and establish a multiplier business model that they can use again and again as new breeds come out,” he says. The next step is to develop first-generation multiplication sites. This will be achieved by enlisting progressive lead farmers who will produce the crop only for the stem cuttings used to grow new plants, not for tuber harvest.
The Marketplace November December 2012
“We’re enabling them to be a business link in this chain,” says Good. “Then we will help these commercial multipliers develop a marketing strategy to second-level multipliers who would not only develop more stems but also grow and harvest the tubers for food or for sale. We want to build it into a commercial system beyond them just swapping with their neighbor.” The anticipated result will be to develop a broad commercially‑based cassava seed multiplication and distribution program that will demonstrate sustainable, replicable and scalable solutions for small farmers. Good notes that doing so will involve some cultural shifts in how subsistence farmers grow cassava. Farmers typically plant from the same stock year
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after year. “It’s essentially been informal farmer-to-farmer selling,” he says. “But with the traditional crop under threat from disease, new stock has to be introduced, multiplied and made commercially available. We want to help people understand how to run a multiplication business, and show them it is viable to do so.” The potential impact is huge, says Good. “There’s never been anything more than informal farmer-to-farmer selling here. As far as I know this is a first, not only in Tanzania but also in East Africa.” Good says MEDA has been asked to arrange a public event in Dar es Salaam that will highlight a number of cassava research and value chain projects being funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Tanzania. ◆
