Commercially Sustainable Cassava Seed Systems in Africa

Abstract

Cassava is an important crop in sub-Saharan Africa for food security, income generation, and industrial development. Business-oriented production systems require reliable supplies of high-quality seed. Major initiatives in Nigeria and Tanzania have sought to establish sustainable cassava seed systems. These include the deployment of new technologies for early generation seed (EGS) production; the promotion of new high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties; the updating of government seed policy to facilitate enabling certification guidelines; the application of ICT tools, Seed Tracker and Nuru AI, to simplify seed system management; and the establishment of networks of cassava seed entrepreneurs (CSEs). CSEs have been able to make profits in both Nigeria (US$ 551–988/ha) and Tanzania (US$ 1,000 1,500/ha). In Nigeria, the critical demand driver for cassava seed businesses is the provision of new varieties. Contrastingly, in Tanzania, high incidences of cassava brown streak disease mean that there is a strong demand for the provision of healthy seed that has been certified by regulators. These models for sustainable cassava seed system development offer great promise for scaling to other cassava-producing countries in Africa where there is strong government support for the commercialization of the cassava sector.

Cassava brown streak: A deadly virus on the move

“…Recent initiatives have attempted to develop commercial clean seed systems (Legg et al., 2022. The BASICS project in Nigeria (Figure 12) supplied improved cassava varieties for local (farmers, communities, consumers) and national (industrial‐scale processors) needs.…”

Emerging concepts in plant breeding and their use for the design of seed delivery and dissemination strategies: a systematic review

“…Among different VPC crops for which LSBs/LSEs have been established we found evidence of potato in Ethiopia and Afghanistan (Ayana et al 2015;Ojiewo et al 2018) as well as cassava in Nigeria and Tanzania (Legg et al 2022). A major achievement of the Great Lakes Cassava Ini�a�ve (GLCI), a collabora�ve project between the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and na�onal agricultural research ins�tutes in Kenya and other countries, has been the establishment of a func�onal cassava community-based seed system through the support of LSBs/LSEs for the produc�on and distribu�on of cassava plan�ng material free of Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) and Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) (Munyi and De Jonge, 2015;Low et al 2022).…”

“…LSBs/LSEs are smallholder farmer groups, coopera�ves and/or individual farmers supported to develop their entrepreneurial skills to become small and medium seed enterprises to produce quality seed and ensure availability and access of seed to farmers in less favourable environments and remote areas. They have also been termed Farmers' Seed enterprises (FSE) (David, 2004;Walsh et al 2015;Aliy, 2016), and Village Seed Enterprises (VSEs) or Village-Based Seed Enterprises (VBSEs) (Bishaw and van Gastel, 2008;Bishaw et al 2009;Bishaw and Niane, 2015;Bossuet, 2017;Legg et al 2022). As SPCs, LSBs/LSEs produce seed of self-pollina�ng and vegeta�vely propagated crops, for which the formal seed sector has litle or no interest, i.e., cereals, pulses, oilseed crops, roots and tubers.…”

New protocol for rapid cassava multiplication in field conditions: a perspective on speed breeding

“…In vitro micropropagation is one such technique, capable of producing high-quality planting material on a large scale and within a short period ( Aladele and Kuta, 2008 ; Feyisa, 2023 ). However, the main drawback of in vitro micropropagation is the high cost of seedling production, primarily due to the sophisticated laboratory requirements and post-bottle management procedures that users often find challenging ( Legg et al., 2022 ). As a result, this methodology is generally limited to producing basic materials for other lower-cost rapid propagation techniques.…”