(A draft for review by partners in the Global Cassava Development Strategy)

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 converted into an array of products -- human food as fresh or processed roots, starch and flour for food and industry, and animal feed. Rice continues a long tradition as the principal and preferred energy source in much of Asia, but where soils are marginal in fertility, and rainfall uncertain, cassava has a strong adaptive advantage. In this context, cassava serves as an ideal focus to achieve several key development goals. Improving this crop is a way to direct various benefits toward the poorest of rural populations.

Cassava's role in food security has declined in post-Green Revolution Asia, but continues as a factor in times of political unrest, wars, food shortages, or other disruptions of normal food supply. On a country-wide basis, only Indonesia has moderately high consumption, about 50 kg per capita per year, in the form of a wide array of different food products. The rapidly growing on-farm use of cassava as animal feed in China and Vietnam meets basic needs both of food security and income generation.

The capacity of the crop to provide income and alleviate poverty is the principal attribute by which cassava functions as a catalyst for development. The forces that enable and augment this central role are: a tradition of diet diversity, which expedites the success of new food products on the market; internal industry demand for starch; and opportunities for export of pellets and starch.

The benefits of development that accrue to the cassava sector are generally skewed toward the lower income strata, thereby edging the economic system toward a greater measure of income equity. However, mechanized production, while occurring slowly, is disproportionally displacing the labor of women. The trend toward larger centralized processing facilities is having similar effects where starch is the main commercial product. The gender equity issue arising out of the modernization of agriculture and industry is not exclusive to cassava, and remedial measures may lie outside the cassava sector, per se.

The links between cassava and environmental protection revolve mainly around implications of the large proportion of this crop grown in fragile or otherwise marginal ecosystems. Cassava's undeserved historical reputation as a crop that causes soil degradation grew out of the plant's ability to produce on poor soils, when most other crops would fail. Nonetheless, managing erosion is a critical need where cassava is grown on slopes and in light soils, especially during the first months before the canopy closes.

Disposal of waste products from processing is a growing environmental concern as processing plants become larger. The solutions lie in research on environmentally and economically sound waste management, by-product development, and developing reasonable regulation.

Trends in Production, Trade, and Utilization

Spanish explorers probably first introduced cassava to Asia, 

through the Philippines, from its Latin American homeland. By the beginning of the 19th century it was widely distributed throughout tropical Asia. Cassava gained status as a famine reserve crop and as a raw product for starch production, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia. World War II disrupted starch trade, and in the post-war era, maize became the principal source of starch.

The region produces about 46 million MT of cassava on 3.5 million hectares (1996). In Southeast Asia it is fourth in production (dry matter basis) after rice, sugarcane and maize. Two-thirds of the total comes from Thailand and Indonesia alone. Seven countries account for 99% of the region's production: Thailand, Indonesia, India, China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. About 40% of cassava is used for direct human consumption, especially in processed form. Most of the remainder is destined for animal feed or processed for starch.

Trade policy has been instrumental in shaping cassava's role in the region. The most economically successful market hinged on policies that opened a niche for cassava in Europe's animal feed industry. Thailand's public and private sectors responded by supporting a vertically integrated system of production, processing and marketing, based on tens of thousands of small producers. From near zero in 1960, Thailand's exports of chips and pellets grew to over eight million tons annually in 1992-94. Gradual withdrawal of cassava's special treatment in Europe's feed market is forcing diversification of the export industry. Whereas in 1982 chips and pellets represented 88% of the total utilization of Thailand's production, this share declined to 70% by 1992. In the same period, starch increased from 12% to 28%. aston martin cygnet

Indonesia has maintained a relatively stable production for over 30 years, with most used internally as human food. In India, cassava is concentrated in the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where intensive cultivation accomplishes the world's highest national average yield levels. China and Vietnam are expanding production to meet rapidly growing internal demands for industrial starch and animal feed.

Overall, cassava is being pushed to continually more marginal areas. This trend has come about as technology and markets for higher value crops has allowed them to enter some of the traditional cassava areas. One result has been to push yields downward, but this has been offset by adoption of new technology such as high-yielding varieties. There are, on the other hand, examples where cassava is cultivated under more favorable conditions -- on larger plantations in southern Sumatra and the Philippines, and in Kerala, India, where early-maturing varieties are planted on paddy land after the first crop.

Assuming application of improved production and post-harvest technology, substantial levels of institutional investment in research, and supportive agricultural and trade policies, there are good prospects for sustained growth in cassava demand and production for the next quarter century (Rosegrant and Gerpacio, 1997). Most of this growth will come from yield increases averaging 0.39% per year. Total area in Asia will climb from 4.0 million (1993) to 4.2 million hectares.

Constraints and Opportunities for System Improvement

Successful interventions to exploit cassava's potential as a medium for development rely on alleviating constraints in the system and pursuing new opportunities. These are impacted by both the larger socio-economic and political milieu, and the characteristics of the cassava sector itself.

An evolution toward more open trade policy brings 

cassava and its products into direct competition with alternative energy sources for food and industry. A competitive position depends on improving efficiencies of production and processing, and on developing new markets.

Urbanization and income growth are changing food consumption habits, with greater diet diversity, less demand for starchy staples, and more demand for convenience foods. Cassava's versatility is a decided advantage for adapting to these changes.

Comparative advantages in marginal and fragile production areas mean that management of the resource base is an acute concern. Thailand has invested in crop diversification programs in the Northeast, in part out of concern about inappropriate practices leading to soil degradation. Concentrated research attention to this issue in the past decade is bringing new options to protect the environment in cassava-based systems, with soil erosion control and fertility maintenance technologies.

Most of Asia's cassava enters markets where raw product substitution can readily occur. These are primarily rice and wheat for food, and maize for feed and starch industries. Soybeans are important as a supplement to cassava's low protein content in animal feeds. The future trends in associated commodities are closely linked with cassava's competitive edge in different markets. In inflation-corrected terms, prices of agricultural commodities have been on a downward trend for the past fifty years, driven by improved efficiencies in production and, recently, lowered trade barriers. Cassava will have to meet and surpass the rates of improvement in efficiency achieved by the major grain crops in order to sustain a competitive edge.

Inadequate infrastructure, especially in rural areas, limits the ability of growers to obtain inputs at reasonable prices, and to market their products. Cassava's bulkiness, especially as fresh roots, make it especially vulnerable to infrastructure constraints. The need for local value-added processes becomes especially critical as a way of sustaining income growth.

Improving cassava's capacity as a catalyst for development requires both a long-term and a multi-faceted agenda. This will only be possible with a network of institutional resources that provide the capacity and motivation to see a viable cassava-based development in Asia. Asia has some of the world's strongest cassava research programs, for example in India and Thailand, but overall the resources committed are inadequate. Networking to achieve complementarities has been highly effective in agronomy, genetic improvement, and post-harvest research. The continuation and strengthening of this work needs to be assured.

An extensive survey to quantify constraints to production and post-harvest factors (Henry and Gottret, 1996) showed that cassava yields in Asia could be almost doubled by applying technology easily within reach of typical cassava farmers.

Soil erosion control and fertility maintenance are now widely recognized as critical to sustainable income generation from cassava. Soil fertility is most commonly maintained by fertilizer inputs, although still at quite low levels in comparison to many crops. The technology for reducing erosion potential includes land preparation practices, fertilization, plant density and varietal canopy characteristics, vegetative erosion barriers, and intercropping or understory crops. Alleviating the constraints from these two components of soil management would increase yields by 33%.

As a whole, Asian countries employ relatively intensive cassava crop management practices, probably the major contributing factor to the higher yields as compared to Africa or Latin America. Still, there are significant improvements to be made. Vegetative reproduction introduces several potential constraints. Appropriate management of planting material can alleviate the effects of biological and physical stresses, for yield gains of about 8%. Weed control is mainly manual, and applying additional labor inputs is impractical for most growers. Farmers are increasingly looking to mechanical or chemical weed control. Improvements should contribute 7% to current yields.

Of the three major producing continents, Asia appears to have the narrowest range of genetic diversity, a constraint that impacts mainly cassava's intrinsic yield potential. Because most of Asia's production is processed, and a high proportion used in industry, there are in general fewer quality criteria to meet as compared to Latin America. The constraint of a narrow genetic base among the local landrace varieties is being met by massive introductions from Latin America since over twenty years ago. New cassava varieties typically take fifteen or more years from time of making a cross to impact on farmers' fields. New varieties already occupy nearly a third of Thailand's cassava area. Growers in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, China and India are increasingly experimenting with and adopting new hybrids from national and international centers. Er machte das, um eine gute Note zu bekommen,- Jura Seminararbeit, alles in super.

Pests and diseases are a minor constraint in most of Asia. Highest potential gains can come from controlling mosaic virus in India and bacterial blight in the subtropics.

Two-thirds of Asia's cassava is grown in the sub-humid or semi-arid tropics, with water stress being the principal climatic constraint. Cassava's remarkable adaptation to drought is one of the main factors that define its distribution. Northeast Thailand, eastern Java, and southern India (mainly Tamil Nadu) are all dry areas where cassava is widely cultivated. A second climatic constraint is low winter temperatures in the sub-tropics, mainly affecting southern China and North Vietnam. Cassava's relatively poor adaptation to cool temperatures is compensated by its tolerance to poor soils in these areas.

While Asia has a highly diversified cassava market sector, the CIAT survey results estimate a 21% potential increase in economic yield is possible through improvements in quality, processing, and product marketing. The largest share of this (13%) is attributed to potential market premiums for quality improvement. This gain could be made mainly with improved root starch content to increase the efficiency of extraction for industrial uses. Longer term, there are possibilities to substantially reduce losses from rapid post-harvest deterioration. Although cassava competes with alternative carbohydrate sources in several major markets, there is potential for developing more markets where unique starch characteristics are required, to bring a market premium to growers. Клиника проктолог центр. дубна.

Priorities and Strategies for Meeting Development Goals

Cassava needs to compete with steadily lower grain prices in its main markets. Its long-term viability hinges on a combination of increased on-farm efficiency and productivity, and expanded market opportunities. Most cassava farmers have limited options for other crops, because of soil and water constraints. For them, cassava must be a link to new economic opportunities.

The broader economic and policy context is crucial to cassava's potential contributions to

 development: policies that support infrastructure development in rural areas, promote trade policy that brings long-term growth with broad benefits, seek equitable investment between urban and rural sectors, build capacity in research and development. While recognizing the importance of this broader environment, this review focuses on the specific goals and activities of cassava research and development. These interventions are broadly divided into demand side and supply side.

On the demand side, the challenge is to target growth sectors with product and market development. In the animal feed and native starch markets, cassava products will compete largely on price, consistency of supply, and quality. Product and process development is already well-advanced in parts of Asia, and there are considerable opportunities for technology transfer within the region. As industry attempts to achieve greater economies of scale, processing is moving away from household and village-level to larger centralized plants, especially for starch. Large plants can better control the variables of production, but at the same time diminish opportunity for growers themselves to add value to the cassava they produce. This, combined with a long-term trend of downward pressure on prices for raw agricultural commodities, challenges the ability of the small Asian farmer to derive reasonable income from cassava. Growers'/processors' cooperatives are an effective way to distribute benefits among a broader base of society. Another opportunity for raising 

incomes is the development of specialty markets. Cassava starch has several unique properties that create demand for particular industrial processes: resistance to shear stress and freezing, high viscosity, and production of transparent gels. Starch content and quality will increasingly become criteria for adding value for producers. The private sector is well-positioned to engage in this type of research, but needs support and collaboration from development-oriented public institutions.

An increase in demand is, in turn, an opportunity to deploy technologies, policies or methodologies that increase supply. The urgent needs on the production side are to substantially increase returns to land and labor, while conserving and improving the resource base.

Some elements of better production technology now exist for many regions, including high-yielding varieties and an effective package of cultural practices. Fertilizer is often the input with best economic returns, but access is a problem. New varieties are spreading rapidly in Thailand, and beginning to make inroads elsewhere.

Genetic improvement is a continuing long-term process, and optimizing progress in Asia will depend on targeted germplasm introductions from the Americas, investment in biotechnology, and expanded networking. Involvement of the private sector in genetic improvement, while probably not imminent, should be encouraged. Risks of introducing new pests or diseases must be minimized with continued vigilance through standard quarantine procedures and training in plant protection.

With modest levels of inputs and management, and new varieties, on-farm trials can easily achieve over twice the national average yields, except in India where farm management is already high. Achieving these increases requires few additional labor inputs. Greater efficiencies in labor productivity will come with further mechanization in land preparation, harvest, and weed control with herbicides or mechanization. However, given the nature of many planting areas, full mechanization will be difficult.

For both demand-side and supply side interventions to succeed, broad institutional

 strengthening is needed. Most countries have some research activity, linked by regional and global networks. Research investment for cassava, on a production value basis, is well below that for the major grain or specialty export crops.

There are effective approaches to achieving a balance in supply and demand that will bring optimum long-term benefit to the cassava sector. For cassava systems, preserving a degree of synchrony between the interventions that target demand and those that target supply is often a special challenge. Production technology may be slow to reach farmers because development time is longer than for most crops (long growing cycle; limited research capacity), extension services are under-staffed and under-funded, and the private sector is only beginning to get involved in cassava technology development or diffusion.

Market demand may develop more quickly, especially where private industry has a vested interest. Integrated projects are a development model that specifically keep supply and demand in balance during the development phase of technology introduction. Expansion of 

both market demand and production can then usually continue with less institutional intervention. Finally, a full commercial phase is reached when demand and production spontaneously find the appropriate level where producers, processors and marketers make a fair profit, and consumers obtain a product at a competitive price.

A complex array of forces are acting on the cassava sector, some of which favor its competitiveness, and others which are a detriment. The balance at which these forces arrive in the next decade will be crucial to the segment of rural Asia that depends on cassava. Cassava is fundamental to the livelihood of a broad sector of the rural poor in Asia. Because of environmental constraints in most of the areas where it is cultivated, growers have few options for alternative crops. Cassava is a key, sometimes the only key, to economic and social opportunity for these farmers. Cassava markets are highly diversified in Asia, stimulating a demand-led growth of the cassava sector in the past. A significant part of this demand grew out of special international trade agreements with Europe, which are now being withdrawn. In global markets, cassava competes mainly with coarse grains, whose prices have tended gradually downward for the past fifty years in response to increasing production efficiencies. The degree to which its production and utilization bring adequate benefits to the poor is very much dependent on future research and development investment. The key elements of that investment will focus on production efficiency and profitability, conservation of the resource base, processing efficiency, and market development of specialized products. Private and public sectors have a mutual interest in supporting a vital cassava industry. A significant institutional and technological base is already in place, on which to build new initiatives. The investments required to achieve these goals are substantial, but assuring a dynamic cassava sector in Asia will bring urgently needed benefits of poverty alleviation, equity, enhanced food security, and protection of the environment.

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