The objective of this report is to provide comprehensive information that will guide investment decisions in the Nigerian cassava subsector. Specifically the study team was mandated to develop a report that covered four topic areas; cassava production, processing and utilization, prices and margins and development clusters. Each topic is discussed in terms of the current status, future targets, new initiatives and a suggested way forward.
It was the intention of this study to draw heavily on data collected and collated by the industry and State and Federal Governments. In travelling across the country it was soon realized that much of the data desired for this study of cassava did not exist. If it did exist, in many cases, it was not in a user friendly format that could be quickly or easily analysed. These realities led the team to develop the first Nigerian Cassava Industry Statistical Handbook.
The Handbook contains over 100 pages of state and national level data in tabular form relevant to the Nigerian cassava industry. The sections provide data on production, processing, utilization, prices, enterprise budgets, transportation, domestic economic indicators and international cassava data. The data is intended to provide a baseline for monitoring changes in the industry and a guide for investments and research. Although some tables are incomplete, sections and table headings are provided, as a guide for future industrial data collection.
The Handbook should be used as a companion when reading this report. Data summarized in this report can be examined in detailed tabular form in the Handbook. It is hoped that as the use and availability of the handbook become widespread, industrial stakeholders, policy-makers and national researchers will be able to undertake their own or similar analysis and interpretation of the data when and as needed. This report together with the Statistical Handbook forms a pool of information from which private sector investor information can be drawn.
The second analytical contribution of this study was the development of Nigerian regional cassava production models. Regional production models have traditionally been used to assess the potential responses of farmers to changes in policy, technology and market conditions. In this study, linear programming was selected as an appropriate technique to use. Ideally, these models are based on enterprise budgets which provide an indication of quantity and cost of production inputs and timing of these activities.
The 40 plus crop enterprise budgets collected from six states, published in the 2000/2001 Advisors Handbook, formed the core data for these models. The constraints to the model were regional land availability and producer food consumption requirements. The regional models are annual models that maximize gross margins (revenue minus input and labour expenditures) subject to minimal farmer consumption and limited by available land. A feature of the models is the assumption that the traditional harvesting of cassava continues into the second year. The implication being for an annual model, enterprises containing cassava require 2 ha of land rather than 1 ha of land, as do all other enterprises.
The regional models were used to compare four scenarios against a base scenario. The base scenario is designed to represent current regional conditions of land use, food consumption and agricultural production. Land constraints are used to ensure that the base results are similar to calculated regional averages. The four scenarios are based around the permutations of two changes. One change results in cassava being harvested in one year as opposed to two years. The second is the adoption of high yielding varieties. The results of these models assisted the analysis of future production, processing and utilization targets and initiatives in the report.
