A new multi-year project assessing sustainable weed management technologies for cassava-based farming systems in Nigeria is being launched by the International Institute ofTropical Agriculture (IITA) and its partners in Ibadan, 28-31 January 2014.
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The
project is seeking to find solutions to the labor-intensive weeding usually
performed by women and children and to increase cassava productivity for 125,000
Nigerian farm families. The project has the
potential to serve as a livelihood transformation model for all cassava-producing
states in Nigeria.
Cassava is generally grown by
smallholder farmers, who appreciate its tolerance of drought and poor soils.
However, its prospects in Nigeria—the world’s largest producer—is being
threatened by insufficiently developed weed management practices. Hand and hoe
weeding are the predominant weed control practices on smallholder cassava farms
and takes 50-80 percent of the total labor budget of cassava growers
with women contributing more than 90 percent of the labor and 69 percent of
farm children between the ages of 5 and 14 are forced to leave school to
perform weeding.
“Weeding requires up to 500 hours of labor per hectare
to prevent economic losses in cassava roots in Nigeria,” says Project Manager Dr
Alfred Dixon. “This burden compromises the women’s responsibilities and the
children’s education, and Nigerian farmers will continue to record low yields until
weed control in cassava is improved. Farm families cannot plant a larger area
than they can weed,” he says. According to him, “Addressing the complex issues
of hunger and poverty is no easy task, and so we see the value in engaging in
new research and deploying our best resources to ensure that smallholder
farmers have access to the best innovations to increase their agricultural
productivity and improve the nutrition of their families.”
The
ultimate aim of this research is to develop state-of the art weed management
practices, by combining improved cassava varieties with proper planting dates,
plant populations, and plant nutrition options. These particular practices may include
the use of herbicides—all of which currently meet globally-accepted conventions
and safety thresholds appropriate for smallholder farmers—to make weed control
in cassava more efficient. Any herbicide activity will be part of a
comprehensive strategy of effective agronomic practices that are collectively
striving to make weed management more effective and sustainable.
The IITA-managed project is supported by a US
$7.7million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
and involves the National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI), Umudike; the University
of Agriculture, Makurdi; the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta; government
representatives, international cassava scientists, the donor community, and the
private sector. “The project will also offer policymakers better information on
modern, relevant, and appropriate weed management technologies. This
information could be used to expand the project to 5 million farm families in
Nigeria,” says Dr Friday Ekeleme, the project’s Principal Investigator.
The sustainable cassava weed management project aligns
with Nigeria’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda and will help to meet the Government’s
goals to increase domestic food production, reduce dependence on food imports,
and expand value addition to locally produced agricultural products. The
project will be handed over to one of the key national institutions in the
development and extension of improved cassava technologies, NRCRI, for scaling-up
the project’s outcomes on a national level.
