Cassava flour is mainly used in the baking industry for baking, manufacturing of
noodles and production of ethanol.
There are so many flour mills in the country who by next year 2005 will be
searching for cassava flour in order to comply with the mandatory 10% cassava
content of baking flour as legislated by the Federal Government.
It is estimated that 40% of the over 30 million tonnes of cassava produced in
Nigeria annually is lost due to lack of processing capacity and market
outlets. Recent IITA report suggest that farmers are becoming unwilling to
embrace the cultivation of high yield cassava species because of lack of
market outlets.
It is being suggested that it will require an installed processing
capacity of about 12 million metric tonnes of cassava tuber processing to
pellets or flour (yield of about 4 million tonnes of pellets or flour) to reduce
the loss to the barest minimum.
There is a large market for good quality cassava starch/flour in Europe due to
increasing interest in the sterling qualities of cassava starch/flour which
includes low gelatilization temperature, clarity and resistance to degradation.
The Nigerian per capita imports of wheat is put at 8.25kg/cap/yr at an average
wheat import price of $414.14/mt for a national consuming population of 100
million. Nigeria will be consuming 825.000 MTS of wheat valued at over N46
Billion/yr. With the current high cost of wheat bread and flour in the face of
diminishing real per capita income, massive currency devaluation (currently $1 –
N135 ) makes partial wheat import substitution with high quality unfermented
cassava flour produced locally from micro, small, medium to large scale flour
mills imperative and very timely.