CASSAVA GROWING GETS BOOST

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Wednesday, 07 November 2012 21:45

A cassava smallholder farmer carries produce she had just harvested. PHOTO | file The Citizen Correspondent Dar es Salaam. The ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will today launch three new joint projects aimed at developing disease resistant cassava varieties to help boost smallholders’ production. The varieties will be able to withstand such diseases as Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) and Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD), while efforts will be made to ensure that farmers have access to the varieties for their use. The projects, with grants amounting to $10,618,588 were officially announced during a Cassava Value Chain event organised in Dar es Salaam. CMD and CBSD are spreading fast in East and Central Africa. Combined, they cause losses of more than $1 billion every year to the cassava industry and wreak havoc on the food security and livelihoods of growers, majority of whom are poor smallholder farmers. According to Agriculture minister Christopher Chiza the projects came at an opportune time when farmers badly needed access to disease resistant varieties in the country. “These are extremely important projects for Tanzania and the region because cassava is a very important crop not only for food security but it also has great potential as a cash crop through processing. These two diseases, especially CBSD, are a major problem to our farmers and need to be urgently addressed,” he said. Led by the department of Research and Development (R&D) at the ministry of Agriculture, the project will be piloted in two of the major cassava-growing zones of Tanzania--Muleba and Chato Districts in the Lake Zone and Mkuranga and Kisarawe Districts in the Eastern Zone. For his part, Gates Foundation programme officer Lawrence Kent said, “Cassava is one of our priority crops, as it is mostly grown by resource-poor smallholder farmers and especially women. Therefore, finding sustainable solutions to its production challenges provides us all an opportunity to make a difference in their lives and make progress in efforts to overcome hunger and poverty.” The Cassava Varieties and Clean Seed to Combat CBSD and CMD (5CP) project will facilitate sharing of five of the best varieties from Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Uganda for regional testing across the countries to speed up the development of varieties with dual resistance to the two diseases. The project, led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (Iita), will further pilot a clean seed system in Tanzania to produce virus-tested cassava planting material for multiplication by either local communities or seed entrepreneurs for sale to farmers.