Cassava – underground food reserve cushions against catastrophic food loss

The life of a Lunagwa Valley farmer is difficult enough with the challenges of unpredictable rainfall, hand tillage of fields, constant need to weed and the long hours of guarding fields from wild animals. Could there be a crop that might reduce some of these risks, while adding food and potential income to a farmer’s livelihood? COMACO took a chance with cassava because of its tolerance to drought, low requirement of farm labor, and its relative protection as an underground tuber from pests that damage granaries.

With help of World Food Program (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2004, COMACO introduced the Kuyuma variety of cassava in its program area and established 20 nurseries of cassava to produce stem cuttings for replantings by neighboring families. At the time, less than 15% of the households grew cassava on plots typically less than an eighth of a hectare, and due possibly to the local variety, yield was also low. An initial 100 farmers were trained and organized in groups of five to grow cassava on a hectare of land as a community nursery. Each group dug a well near the cassava plots and were provided with treadle pumps to aid irrigation during the dry season. These wells also facilitated the irrigation of small-scale vegetable gardens for group members.

In the following year, tens of thousands of cassava cuttings became available for replanting and an additional 30 nurseries were established to continue the expansion of cassava production in the COMACO areas. By 2006, COMACO had distributed over 8 million cuttings through its local network of producer groups and upwards to 75% of the these households were growing cassava. Expanding this farmer-to-farmer support of cassava cuttings continues today under COMACO with support from the Royal Norwegian Embassy and has reached an annual production of about 10,000 tons of cassava.

Mwasemphangwe is one of the areas COMACO focused its efforts to introduce cassava and where over 750 families are now supplementing their food and income with cassava. Mr. John Mbewe testified how he benefited from growing cassava when he joined the program in 2004. After his training in cassava production, he received 10 bundles of 80 cassava cuttings per bundle. He explains, “After helping establish a nursery, I realized what a good crop cassava is and I expanded production on a larger scale so that I could also sell cuttings to other households in the areas.”
Mr Mbewe became the chairman of his cassava producer group because of experience under COMACO. In 2006 Mr Mbewe and his group won a tender to supply 300,000 bundles of cassava cuttings to the Ministry of Agriculture and Co-operative and raised K2.1million. “I later began harvesting tubers and sold them in Chipata, where I realized K2.8 million. In total I have earned about K5million ($1390) from my cassava,” he revealed.

The benefits of cassava to communities living in the Valley areas became very clear in 2006. In recent past years, floods affecting specific drainage rivers into the Luangwa River had left 100s of families famished from crop loss and vulnerable to coping strategies like wildlife poaching, over-fishing and making of charcoal. When the big floods of 2006 hit much of the Valley, the large-scale production of cassava supported by COMACO provided a natural experiment for the importance of cassava as a food reserve and as an indirect way of reducing hunger-related pressures to poach wildlife and degrade other renewable resources.
From a sample of 1001 local Valley residents who had a cassava crop, 84% said they would have faced very serious problems of hunger because of flood-related crop loss were it not cassava. As people saw the rising flood waters, families harvested the cassava tubers as well as cassava stems, which were stored for later replanting. Had they not harvested, the waterlogged soils would have destroyed the tubers. With their large cache of starch-rich food, families were able to survive the wet season and avoided such acts of desperation as fishing or poaching to help barter for food.
COMACO extensions officer, Simon Banda, who lives with the farmers in Mwanya and Mkhanya areas, put it like this, “We’ll never know how many wild animals we saved, or even human lives we saved, but for sure, COMACO’s effort to expand cassava production has made it possible to divert a natural disaster from being more serious.” It was a lesson that did not need a teacher to explain. Farmers saw for themselves the importance of crop diversification and a particular crop that people could count on in special time of need.