Nigeria’s First Cassava Early Generation Seed Company Grows Despite COVID-19 Setbacks

An early generation seed company in Nigeria, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA GoSeed, has made significant progress in 2021, as sales of improved cassava planting materials averaged $267, 277, despite COVID-19 restrictions.

The IITA GoSeed revealed this recently, during the annual meeting of the Building an Economically Sustainable Integrated Cassava Seed System, Phase 2 (BASICS-II).

In a statement issued by the IITA, the Vegetative Seed Specialist of IITA GoSeed, Dr Mercy Diebiru-Ojo, disclosed that sales were driven primarily by orders from farmers and processors who aim to get higher yields to meet consumers’ demand, saying the sales were achieved despite COVID-19 restrictions that hurt seed supply chains.

Diebiru-Ojo, who sees a positive outlook in 2022, remarked: “We are optimistic that sales and expansion will get better in coming years.”

The statement says through its business model, the company established 142 ha of early generation seeds comprising 122 ha of breeder seeds and 20 ha of foundation seeds across 8 states in Nigeria.

“We worked with outgrowers to achieve this target while ensuring that women were active participants,” Diebiru-Ojo explained.

According to the statement, the Project Manager of BASICS-II, Prof Lateef Sanni, who spoke at the meeting, commended the progress made by IITA GoSeed, noting that the company is a vital node in the cassava seed value chain.

For the Technical Advisor to BASICS-II, Dr Alfred Dixon and IITA Deputy Director General (Partnership for Delivery), Dr Kenton Dashiell, the progress made by GoSeed was a demonstration of farmers’ desire to rapidly transform the cassava ecosystem. They called on the team to sustain the momentum by not resting on its oars.

The statement explains that IITA GoSeed, a private seed company of the IITA, was established as part of the BASICS project to help meet the demand for early generation planting materials, with cassava as the first target crop.

Although Nigeria is the world’s largest producer of cassava, yield per ha of cassava is low (less than 8 tons per ha) compared to other countries like Thailand, with yield per ha of more than 20 tons. Researchers blame the yield gap partly on the use of local varieties that occupy 40 percent of the cassava growing areas in Nigeria.

Addressing bottlenecks

The BASICS-II project was established to address the bottlenecks in the cassava seed system with a view to granting farmers easy access to affordable planting materials in an economically sustainable approach, which led to the creation of GoSeed in IITA and Umudike Seed at the National Root Crops Research Institute, Umudike — both in Nigeria.

IITA GoSeed is closely linked with breeding programmes in IITA and in collaboration with the National Agricultural Seed Council (NASC), the company ensures that materials going to CSEs are disease-free and of high genetic potential.

Some of the improved varieties that GoSeed is pushing include TME419, Dixon, Ayaya, Farmers Pride, Fine Face, Game changer, Poundable, and Obasanjo-2.

The success of IITA GoSeed has attracted other related projects such as the GIZ-GIAE/IITA Cassava & Maize Value Chain Project (funded by GIZ) and other interventions to the cassava seed system.

The projects have formed partnerships with the company and have adopted the BASICS model — a seed system approach, developed by BASICS-II, that connects seeds system actors and ensures that farmers access improved varieties in an economically sustainable manner.

Emmanuel Ukoh