Against Cassava

It is time for Nigeria and Nigerians to be free from this damned crop

The popular Insider Food account on Instagram (3.2 million followers) has one of its short snazzy video/reel on cassava:

insiderfood

A post shared by @insiderfood

In about a minute it manages to cover the origins of cassava in South America and how it then made to Africa, first via Portuguese traders and then later to Nigeria in the late 19th century via returning slaves. The rest as they say is history.

Please don’t be fooled by this type of soft cassava propaganda. If ever there was a time to admonish people to ‘stay woke’, it is now. To put it mildly, it was a mistake for those returning slaves to have brought back cassava with them. They should have brought something, anything, else.

The case against cassava is straightforward enough to make. Let’s start with this passage from James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States:

History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states. (“Banana republics” don’t qualify!) My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentration of human subjects.

In contrast the tuber cassava (aka manioc, yucca) grows below ground, requires little care, is easy to conceal, ripens in a year, and, most important, can safely be left in the ground and remain edible for two more years. If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dig up the tubers one by one, and then it has a cartload of little value and great weight if transported. If we were evaluating crops from the perspective of the premodern “tax man”, the major grains (above all, irrigated rice) would be among the most preferred, and roots and tubers among the least preferred (Page 19)

When I was growing up in Kaduna, we had a fairly large piece of land in between our house and the next one along the road (this was the same for all the houses) so we turned the space to farming. A bit of corn, some egusi, maybe some yams and beans and always some cassava. For us as kids it was fun (except the part where we had to make ridges with hoes) to take part in as much as we were allowed to. Maize was tricky as the planting always needed some ‘professionalism’ in terms of how the planting was spaced, how deep to dig the hole and how many seeds to plant in each hole before covering it up. And all of this was more complicated when you were planting maize and something else on the same line (say egusi). We kids were never really allowed to handle that.

MidJourney Prompt: Nigerian farmers uprooting their cassava plants and throwing them away as they rebel against the plant

But cassava? We always got that job. There was no digging needed, nothing to be measured, spacing could be done by eye. We simply took the stem from the previous year, broke it by hand (or maybe someone might cut it for us with a knife) and then walked along the ridge while sticking each one into the ground at an angle. That was all.

And this is why I’m passionately anti-Cassava and hope to one day see it eradicated from Nigeria - it is too easy. Much of human achievement has been driven by the necessity to master the environment around us - generating and controlling heating when it is too cold, harnessing and controlling cooling when it is too hot, manipulating large bodies of water for transport and energy and so on. Compared with many other countries in the world, you might say Nigeria has had it easy in terms of its environment. It really is one type of weather all year round - if you want to be strict you might say Nigeria has rainy season and non-rainy season. Clothes don’t need to be changed from one season to the next. Unlike some countries where certain crops can only be grown in a very short summer window, anything can be grown anytime in Nigeria subject to rain or man made irrigation.

Throwing cassava into such a mix improves nothing and at worst, it encourages laziness. You quite literally just need to stick it in the ground and forget about it. It does not need any special care or attention - a requirement that can help develop attention to detail in a country’s human capital which can then make the transition to manufacturing, for example, much smoother. Once this insidious characteristic of cassava is understood, you can begin to appreciate the damage it can do if it comes to dominate a country’s agriculture. Skills are like muscles and when they are not regularly exercised, they shrink. If too many people are planting cassava in your agricultural economy, moving to anything else more complex becomes a lot harder than it should be.

An example I talk about all the time is the Psychological Dutch Disease damage from crude oil. One day in a faraway land, someone came across crude oil and then after much experimentation and years of investment to invent and perfect the technology, they find out how to refine the crude and produce all sorts of things that people want from it (profitably). All of a sudden the demand for crude oil goes up dramatically and people are looking for it anywhere they can find it. It is at this point that Nigeria enters the story. The people running Nigeria have had no involvement in the process until now but some foreigners suddenly show up and tell them that there is crude oil under their feet (the Nigerian leaders have no idea how it got there) and they would like to pay them to extract it. Next thing the Nigerian leaders know, they are awash with billions of dollars. All they have to do is exist on top of the land where there is oil underground and some foreigners will bring their own capital, technology and still pay them billions after deploying both to extract the crude oil and take it to wherever to do whatever with. Stuff like this can mess with your brain in a bad way and one clear effect - the Psychological Dutch Disease - is that it has made Nigerian leaders think that everything is easy. As a result they are unable to develop the skills or discipline needed to really tackle difficult stuff. Why bother? Crude oil becomes the reference point in terms of any effort and reward calculation.

Back to James C. Scott’s point: a crop that makes it easy to dodge taxes like cassava is one that makes it much harder to build a state. And to repeat, the problem is allowing such a crop to reach any level of dominance in a country’s agricultural mix. It is not valuable - according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), the entire trade in cassava and all its derivatives across the whole world in 2021 was $3.7bn with Thailand the largest exporter selling $1.3bn worth of the thing. Cassava represents 0.017% of world trade, a rounding error. So the solution here is not to throw in more effort to ‘process’ cassava for export or any other fantasy.

According to a PwC report, Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world accounting for 21% of global production:

This is very unfortunate. The correct amount of cassava Nigeria should be producing is zero. So much time, energy and land dedicated to the cultivation of an essentially useless and harmful crop might not be the cause of Nigeria’s poverty but it will ensure the country does not get out of it anytime soon.

I know I will inevitably get the ‘what are we going to drink in place of Garri if we get rid of cassava?’ questions and my answer is simply that you consider drinking something else. By continuing to drink Garri and eat Eba, you’re quite literally holding the country back and drinking away the country’s future. Do you not have any shame or conscience?

I have a dream that one day, Nigerians will rise up in consciousness from Potiskum to Port-Harcourt and from Langtang to Lekki carrying any cassava tubers or stems they can find, marching towards to the Atlantic Ocean where they will dump them while declaring ‘no longer shall we be slaves to this crop that has kept us poor for too long’.

Join your local Anti Cassava Coalition today. And if there isn’t one near where you live, start one.