Local cassava production falls short of industries’ demand

Nigeria remains the world’s largest cassava producer, with output rising by 10 percent over the last five years—from 56.96 million tons in 2019 to 62.69 million tons in 2023. Yet, experts say the country’s cassava supply still falls short of what industries require to drive value addition.

Although Nigeria’s production surpasses Brazil’s and nearly doubles that of Thailand and Indonesia, the country’s cassava is consumed almost entirely as food. Over 80 percent of Nigerians eat garri and fufu, leaving less than 5 percent of the crop for industrial use.

This strong domestic demand, according to stakeholders, means efforts to scale cassava processing must be fired up significantly.

“As processors, it is very 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.

“When manufacturing companies want to set up a processing business, they go to the middle belt. While they don’t produce as much cassava as the southwest, they also don’t eat a lot of garri,” he added.

Usman explained that productivity must begin with surplus.

“Agri processors and agriculture can only exist when there’s a creation of surplus value. A nation needs to move beyond consumption before it can feed industries.”

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He recalled how Flour Mills once tried producing High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF) — a wheat substitute for biscuits, spaghetti, and bread — but had to shut it down due to inconsistent cassava supply.

The initiative, inspired by the federal government’s Cassava Master Plan aimed at reducing wheat imports, failed because cassava, even in its most basic processed form like garri, is too embedded in household consumption. “It felt like we were competing against consumers,” he said.

This is not far-fetched. The national demand for garri in Africa’s most populous nation is estimated at 1 million tons annually, while supply is estimated to be about 250,000 tons. This significant demand-supply gap highlights the high consumption of garri in the country.

But this reliability as a food source has made the crop more valuable to households than to industries.

The root tuber crop is usually grown across the southeastern, southwestern, and central states, often intercropped with other staples. Yet, only about 5 percent of total output goes into industrial processing—far behind countries like Thailand, which has turned cassava into a major export product in the form of starch, pellets, and chips.

And although Nigeria surpasses Thailand in cassava production by more than 50 percent (30.61 million metric tons), the Asian country has found a way to boost its yield per hectare to 20.61 per tons while Nigeria boasts 6.3 per tons, according to data from 2023 FAOStat.

Amidst this scuffle between consumers and industries, Dangiwa Philips, a cassava farmer in Ogun State, says his biggest customers are processors.

“I supply about 700,000 tons monthly to a particular processing company,” he said. “I don’t think value addition is the issue. The problem is the lack of an available market for processed products. A lot of Nigerians are poor, so they buy garri because it is affordable.”

Reaffirming the words of Philips, Ola Olawale, a Lagos-based accountant, said: “I cannot imagine buying cassava in a form that is not garri or fufu. I’d rather stick to what I’m familiar with.”

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However, experts say that with a national value chain of approximately N27.6 trillion, Nigeria can fully harness its cassava wealth through intentional efforts to bolster production and yield, meeting the demands of industries to drive value addition.

The 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 start to climb up in the (cassava) value chain and stay up,” Usman urged.

This is critical as the World Bank estimates that 87 million Nigerians live below the poverty line, establishing a growing need for garri, especially since it remains one of the cheapest foods in the country.

On how Nigeria can move past consumption, Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria, stressed modernising agriculture as key to bolstering food production. He made this known at the Agriconnect summit.

“It is high time we go 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 cassava economy.