Nigeria Is The Biggest Cassava Producer In The World. Why Isnt It Cashing In On The Global Market?

Nigeria is the world's biggest producer of cassava or Yuka the root is a staple food here made into Fufu and gari in some regions it makes up as much as half of the calories eaten but he's at home with every part of Africa cassava became so popular because it resists drought in pests the root is calorie Rich high in vitamin C and can replace more expensive

starches like wheat or rice experts say areas that grow cassava are less likely to endure famine today cassava is finding growing markets in Europe North America and Asia touted as a versatile gluten-free SuperFood it can be turned into valuable exports like ethanol for biofuel sweetener and starches like tapioca for bubble tea but most of the cassava Nigeria grows never leaves the country so it could be

missing out on billions in global trade challenges plague its entire supply chain from Farm to factory for one cassava needs to be processed in less than 48 hours or it rots but most processing plants are hundreds of miles from farms as of 2015 the country had lost 600 million dollars worth of cassava to spoilage entrepreneur you missy Iran Loya says she's found a way to fix

that she launched a processing company called sultry International and has since landed customers like Nestle and Unilever but now that we are turning into industrial use there's high demand for the crop so farmers can get good value for their crops so can Nigeria fix its supply chain enough to feed itself and cash in on a global export Market [Music] cassava is a shrub with edible roots

that's native to South America the raw root can be poisonous it actually has cyanide in it but more than 4 000 years ago indigenous people in the Amazon River Basin discovered that grading straining and cooking cassava made it safe to eat Portuguese colonizers first introduced cassava to Africa in the 16th century then in the 1850s when formerly enslaved Africans returned to Nigeria they brought cassava cooking

methods with them from Brazil Europeans pushed the cultivation of cassava in Africa because it was Hardy and could help prevent famine during this time new ways to cook the root sprung up across the continent in Nigeria they ground up and dried the cassava pulps into flakes called gari because it's fermented gari helped harvested cassava last longer over the centuries the roots replaced native yams as the

main food source across the continent almost every family have cassava at their backyard to make Gary or to make Fufu whether rich or poor today Nigeria produces more than 60 million tons a year but experts say cassava Farmers aren't growing it efficiently so they take home just one dollar a day you're farming on really small plots so you're not getting the benefit of economies of scale

large-scale Farmers usually grow more delicate crops like corn rice or wheat because they can be more profitable than cassava the ones growing cassava often do it because they have no other choice cassava can handle acidic poor quality soil it needs less fertilizer and water and it's generally cheaper to grow but because of uneven soil machinery and tractors can't reach many cassava fields and since they're harvesting

by hand and growing seed varieties that don't produce as many roots Nigerian cassava Farmers have some of the worst yields in the world meaning they harvest less of it per acre but yamisi believed she could change that she spent years saving up money to open her own cassava processing business in 2005. sultry International we started with 17 Farmers the youngest of there was about 55 some

of their moms died in our blessed memories she grew Farmers so they could buy and cultivate more land together like this nearly 500 Acre Farm ERS have moved from one acre to about average of about 20 acres today she brought in foluke adelike as a head of Agriculture to introduce new stronger cassava varieties onto her partner Farms this is a new variety and it is known

for his good starch contents and it has a better huge the roots are big so you can see it's very big kimisi has also been able to introduce tractors on some plots speeding up Harvest by 150 percent because these Farms are harvesting more cassava Embassy can pay more she cut out any middlemen and directly pays Farmers nearly four times more than the open market Now farmers

know how much they'll make off their crop before they even plant we've been able to move Farmers from less than one dollar a day in the last 10 years to about 10 a day today all of her efforts have gotten a lot of attention over the last 18 years she's partnered with 10 000 farmers about six thousand are men about four thousand are women after pulling

up a load of massive Roots workers throw them onto trucks Bound for sultry's processing plant ninety percent of the country's cassava is eaten locally mostly asgari and Fufu [Music] aderoju adijat has been a Gary producer since 1995. every day her Factory processes two to three truckloads of cassava workers peel and wash the incoming roots then they grind drain press and Fry the cassava to make the

gari's signature flakes the peeled cassava has to be soaked for three days to make the staple side dish Fufu it's pounded sieved and drained before forming a paste one mouthful half is enormity without forcing with me how about foreign processing cassava into much more valuable products like starch and sweetener but she faced another big challenge getting these roots to factories since cassava is almost 75 water

it's perishable and can spoil within just 48 Hours of harvesting so it basically needs to be processed in some way uh almost immediately but most factories are near cities down long roads in poor condition I thought farmers were traveling 200 kilometers 300 kilometers and before they get there the crops are bad or trucks are broken down [Applause] until recently forty percent of cassava grown was lost

to spoilage and processing plants weren't working at capacity so yamisi tried something different [Music] because once it's processed cassava won't spoil as quickly today sultry handles a hundred million kilos of cassava a year at factories like this one [Applause] this is the area where the reception is done that's ogubo odega Florence the plant manager that brings heaps of cassava drops it inside this silos the belt

takes the cassava to the dry cleaner that removes some preliminary deaths and dust sand a wet wash finishes the cleaning process and gets into the peeling machine so that the further pills can be removed from the cassava those peels will be used as animal feed there are cheaper alternative to corn feed then the crusher chops the cassava into smaller pieces the final process cassava starch or

flour can be made into a number of products from pastries breads noodles seasoning for Nestle and tapioca pearls for bubble tea this is also the first sorbitol Factory in all of Nigeria the sweetener it creates can sell for over 10 times the price of raw cassava Unilever uses yamisi sorbitol to make products like toothpaste and mouthwash imagine how many we are in Nigeria or in Africa

and all the what we thought imported into Africa come from Asia and yes we almost brush our mouths every day whether we are poor or Rich while huge customers have helped you missy become one of the largest processors in the country she hasn't been able to export much she does ship her sorbitol internationally but hasn't had luck exporting flour or starch and she's not alone Nigeria

is the world's top cassava producer but it's ranked 59th on the global list of exporters in 2021 Thailand earned nearly 1.3 billion dollars from exporting cassava despite producing less than half as much as Nigeria that same year Nigeria earned just one million dollars it's not like the demand isn't there a global market for Sorbitol is expected to rise as more people turn to sugar-free products Nigeria

actually has to import 95 percent of its starch because demand outpaces production Rising wheat prices due to the war in Ukraine have driven up interest in cassava flour and then there's ethanol a valuable biofuel also used in beer and winemaking and pharmaceutical products some estimate cassava ethanol production alone could earn the country billions but the final problem is adoption yes cassava is an important food staple

but yamisi says not enough Nigerians know that it can also be processed into lucrative export products now the government has done things to help increase demand domestically but experts say it needs to invest more to boost exports and producers have told us they want more government support like building better roads near farms and increasing investments in new cassava varieties because you missy thinks sultry is proving

cassava Investments can actually work remember like 12 years ago Farmers with Farm then we had to call the cows to come and eat it all got nobody to buy but now that we are turning into industrial use there's high demand for the crops so farmers can get good value for their crops if Nigeria can grow process and Export more it could tap the huge economic potential

of cassava we grow the highest amount of cassava in the world we are now ready to take our place at the global state [Music] thank you