These difficult months of the COVID pandemic have once more brought to the fore the need to address our long term food security. Our accessibility to food has been disrupted as incomes have decreased due to reduced formal and informal employment opportunities. The availability of food is threatened as we have seen export restrictions imposed by some food exporting countries, input prices for our own domestic production rise, and available labour has been reduced for planting, harvesting and distributing food due to social distancing policies.
CARICOM, like other economic blocks across the globe, is rethinking supply chains and seeking opportunities to increase their degree of food self-reliance. In a recent virtual symposium organized by our regional Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to discuss “Food and Agriculture in the post COVID period”, seven strategic agri-investment opportunity areas were introduced. These were cassava products, coconuts products, meat (beef, pork, mutton), niche vegetables, corn and rice (as feed), poultry meat (singled out from other meats given its significance in consumption) and hatching eggs.
The opportunity I will address today is the production and utilization of cassava products.
First and foremost, the point of departure for any strategy to develop cassava products is to understand that the goal is the development of an industry. This expanded agro-industry would include small, medium and large scale farmers, processors, distributors and manufacturers who produce cassava products for utilization by consumers and industry. A full-fledged cassava industry is not a dream, it is a vision based on a fledgling industry already in place. In the CARICOM region the first steps on this path have already been taken. We need more industry champions, like those individuals that comprised the teams, that took these first steps.
Let me highlight two companies in two CARICOM countries which serve as concrete examples making the case for the vision of a cassava industry to be embraced by leaders, policy makers, relevant institutions, and private sector participants all along the value chain.
The first example is Purity Bakery in Barbados. Since 2015 Purity Bakery has been producing a regular loaf of sliced bread that is made with cassava as 40% of its ingredients. This bread is on sale daily in the main supermarkets across Barbados. The bread is, as we might say, so popular it is “jumping off the shelves”. In 2017, 740, 000 tons of wheat and 113,000 tons of wheaten flour imports had an estimated value of US$250 million. Replacing ten percent of the imported wheat with cassava would require more than 35,000 hectares of cassava, based on estimated average yields.
Wheat and wheaten flour imports consistently comprise approximately 5% of the CARICOM food import bill which is close to US$4 bn.
At the Caribbean Week of Agriculture in Guyana in 2014, there was a demonstration of a large variety of cassava-based food products and different uses of cassava.
In 2015, as a part of the initiative promoting cassava products by the Barbados-based Caribbean regional office of FAO, a one hundred percent regional cassava muffin filled with carambola fruit, were taken on board by some of the upscale coffee shops in Barbados. The opportunities for food ingredient substitution with cassava have been successfully demonstrated.
A second concrete example where cassava has a major opportunity is in the beer industry. The Red Stripe brewery in Jamaica is a pioneer in the Caribbean in this regard by using 5% of cassava starch in its Red Stripe brew. The goal is to convert cassava to starch and eventually to high maltose syrup (HMS) thus replacing some of the imported high maltose corn syrup (HMCS). The world’s first commercial beer brewed with cassava was launched in 2011 by the Mozambican subsidiary of the SAB Miller Brewing Company. The beer, named Impala, is produced with 70% cassava and 30% barley. In 2019, Impala won a Gold Medal for Quality from Monde Selection, the International Quality Institute, in Brussels. Among several countries now using cassava as an ingredient in beer is Samoa Breweries in the Pacific, producing an excellent beer named Vailima. Growing cassava, not only for food, but also for the beer industry can be a major employment creator in the Caribbean region, thereby improving rural livelihood systems and increasing food security. Can we create the enabling environment for CARICOM breweries to follow suit? Can we challenge the breweries to explore this opportunity?
Building food security through agricultural industries needs an integrated and inclusive strategy. This requires a cassava industry that includes a large number of enterprises of all sizes, all along the value chain, working synergistically and where possible collectively, adding volume and value to a wide variety of cassava products for diversified markets. To make this happen needs action at four key levels. Firstly, technology development institutions need to assist with productivity enhancing interventions from cassava grower, to manufacturer and distributor. This is particularly critical for ensuring cost effectiveness of the industry. Secondly, national policy must provide incentives for consumption, utilization and trading. Thirdly, funding agencies need to be more creative using blended funding strategies and flexible requirements to support a broad vision of regional industrial development. Fourthly, market information support organizations need to be more proactive, providing in real time the data on prices, volumes, and standards required by the different market opportunities. The available acreages of suitable land are available given the loss of sugar and banana market opportunities. The institutions are in place to produce quality planting material.
The choice of cassava is a logical one. Latin America and the Caribbean is the evolutionary homeland of cassava. It is an integral part of the food and cultural fabric of our societies. It is an excellent climate change crop as it is well recognized for its resilience. It has a high tolerance to low soil fertility, it can be cultivated in areas that suffer from droughts and floods, and it is resistant to pests and diseases. Its roots can be stored in the ground for long periods even after the plant matures. Under the most extreme negative conditions, it can still yield about 13 metric tons of tubers per hectare.
In addition, health experts also praise the benefits of cassava. Cassava, which is free of gluten, can be used in the preparation of special foods, for example, for patients with celiac disease who are gluten intolerant. Cassava is also considered to be a moderate source of some of the valuable B-complex group of vitamins such as folates, thiamine, pyridoxine (vitamin B-6), riboflavin and pantothenic acid. The health literature also indicates that cassava is a chief source of some important minerals like zinc, magnesium, copper, iron, and manganese for many inhabitants in the tropical belts. Thus, the greater consumption of cassava could also contribute to addressing our concerns for obesity and NCD’s in the region which is heavily influenced by consumption of highly processed imported food products.
The above examples of cassava use in food and beer, by no means exhausts its uses. Noteworthy is that cassava can also replace some of the corn in poultry feed. Sixty percent of the region’s imported corn goes into making feed. This represents 300,000 tonnes of corn estimated at an imported cost of US$62 million. To substitute 10% of the corn would require an estimated 7,500 hectares across the region.
More broadly, cassava pellets have been imported by many European countries in the past as a biofuel energy source. Cassava boasts numerous other industrial applications, used around the world, that include plywood, textiles and paper, to name a few.
Using what is ours and building the cassava industry will require an understanding of the market opportunities, the cassava farmers and their production systems, the processors of cassava and the users of the final cassava based food products, beer, feed, fuel and more. With this cumulative understanding, a regional industrial development strategy for the cassava industry could be agreed upon and serve as the basis for implementation. It is doable. It will take extraordinary effort by those who understand the cassava industry opportunity. Let the COVID pandemic be our catalyst to establish the cassava industry that can contribute to advancing our collective regional food security.
