…Lack of fresh tubers, competition with households, high input costs tapped
Nigeria does not have enough cassava tubers for its processors despite producing one-fifth of global output.
Cassava processors say they do not have a sufficient supply of fresh tubers to keep their factories running due to lack of fresh tubers and competition from households consuming cassava as food.
“As processors, it is difficult to compete with the person turning cassava into garri at the back of their farms,” said Sadiq Usman, managing director of Flour Mills Nigeria Agro, at the 2025 Agriconnect summit, recently.
He recalled how Flour Mills once tried producing High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF) but had to shut it down due to inconsistent cassava supply.
The demand for cassava has risen by over 50 percent after the devaluation of the naira and scarcity forced millers to look inwards for the closest substitute of wheat.
Jude Okafor, national secretary for the Association of Master Bakers and Caterers of Nigeria (AMBCN), during a Twitter space programme in 2023, told BusinessDay that the need to curtail the constant surge in flour prices caused millers to seek alternatives.
Owing to the health benefits of cassava flour – gluten-free properties and inclusion in wheat flour for bread and other confectionery – it became a preferred choice among flour millers in the country.
Cassava mostly consumed as food
Oluwayemisi Iranloye, chief executive officer of Psaltry International Limited, reiterated that many cassava millers are running below capacity because of limited raw materials.
“Nigeria’s current cassava production is not enough to meet the demands of processors,” she said. “We need to ramp up production.”
She explained that over 80 percent of cassava production is consumed as food, with the recent surge in garri consumption, owing to the country’s worsening cost-of-living crisis.
Low output
Nigeria remains the world’s largest cassava producer, churning out 62.69 million metric tons (MT) in 2023, according to the most recent data from the Food and Agricultural Organisation.
However, demand has continued to surge significantly while production remains muted since 2019. Data from FAO shows that Nigeria’s cassava production has grown by 10 percent in five years, from 57 million MT in 2019 to 62.7 million MT in 2023.
According to experts, this growth is slower than the country’s population growth rate of 2.1 percent, according to the World Bank.
“Our food production is not growing as fast as our population growth rate, hence the huge shortfall in cassava production and demand,” said AfricanFarmer Mogaji, project manager team lead at AfricanFarmer Hub.
In 2016, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture put the country’s national cassava demand at 53.8 million MT and production at 42 million MT, leaving a supply-demand gap of 11.8 million. Experts say the figure may have tripled with the current surge in demand.
Way forward
With over 60 million tons of annual production, stakeholders argue that Nigeria’s yield can be further increased through intensive diversification and investment in mechanisation.
“We need to look at diversification like we are doing in palm oil. It is high time we started to climb up in the {cassava} value chain,” Usman noted.
This is critical as the World Bank estimates that 87 million Nigerians live below the poverty line, establishing a growing need for garri, especially as it is one of the cheapest foods in the country.
Usman Othman, president of the Nigeria Cassava Growers Association (NCGA), pinned the shortfall in production to inadequate input access for farmers. “If farmers have access to inputs such as fertilisers and seeds, production will definitely meet demand.”
Nigeria’s cassava production grows at an annual average of four percent due to inadequate access to inputs and mechanisation.
Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria, while speaking at the Agriconnect summit, stressed the need to modernise agriculture to bolster food production.
“It is high time we went beyond hoe and cutlass farming. We need to incorporate more youths into agriculture,” he said, adding that mechanised farming is essential for boosting output and building a viable agricultural economy.
