How do you foster a high-quality cassava seed value chain that is attractive to commercial seed producers?

Hemant Nitturkar (CGIAR-RTB) and Emmanuel Azaino (Catholic Relief Services Nigeria) discuss their experience working with village-level cassava seed entrepreneurs to foster sustainable, improved cassava seed businesses. See background on their BASICS project here.

Dr. Malachy Okoroda, the new Director of Global Cassava Platform for the 21st Century (GCP21), speaking candidly at the plenary of the recent GCP21 conference in Benin, said cassava should produce, “Food for the stomach and money for the pocket; everything else is just materials and methods.”

Over the last few decades, 46 improved cassava varieties have been released in Nigeria. But the recent Gates-funded Cassava Monitoring Survey showed a mixed bag of adoption outcomes. Using healthy, suitable, improved seed is the starting point towards higher productivity that will benefit stakeholders across the value chain.

Currently, improved seeds are not widely available where farmers need them. Given the slow and low multiplication ratio of cassava and its bulky nature, two innovations are essential: 1) improved seed multiplication ratio and 2) improved proximity of seed production to the locations where farmers will plant. The BASICS project has successfully piloted a revolutionary yet simple rapid multiplication technology in cassava, and has set up a chain of over 140 community-based village seed entrepreneurs distributed across Benue, Abia, Imo, Akwa Ibom and Cross River states in Nigeria.

Chief Chukuma Obisike is a successful “village seed entrepreneur” (VSE) active in the seed business for many years. He has cassava seed farms in Akoli-Imenyi village of Abia state. He says his healthy stems are already committed to buyers even before they are ready for harvest. But we also saw a lady passing by his improved seed production farm, carrying a load of non-descript bundles of stems. Also, just a few steps away from Obisike’s seed farm, we saw a family ready to plant uncertified stems of unknown variety from a local neighbouring field. She was aware of the presence of the VSE but it did not occur to her to buy certified stems from Obisike, fearing that she could not afford it.

Readers, how can we enthuse large numbers of people to adopt certified planting material of improved varieties to create a system-level impact? Do you have experience in creating demand for cassava? Please share your insights in the comments section below.

This post mentions two items: Sustainable Cassava Seed Systems (SCSS) and Building an Economically Sustainable, Integrated Seed System in Nigeria (BASICS). Catholic Relief Services (CRS) lead the SCSS while the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas is leading BASICS. CRS leads the VSE component of BASICS.