Authors : Kwame Obeng Dankwa and Bright Boakye Peprah
Abstract: In Ghana, cassava is a marginalized crop in food policies due to low research attention it has received compared to the popularly known cereals such as maize and rice. However, high starch content of the cassava root is an important characteristic that present the crop as a potential industrial raw material to serve as employment to improve income and livelihoods. In light of this, the government of Ghana in 2001 introduced an initiative called the Presidential Special Initiative (PSI) on Cassava, which aimed at substantially increasing the nation’s export revenue through transformed smallholder production methods and development of cassava-starch industries in Ghana. Ethanol is reported as the largest opportunity for cassava industrialization in Ghana followed by food-grade starch. However, local beverage manufacturers such as Kasapreko still imports over 25 million litres of ethanol every year. This is because of inadequate supply of ethanol from local starch factories. This can largely be attributed to lack of cassava varieties that can yield about 75% or more starch of their total dry weight to feed the starch factories for sustainable production. Therefore, this review seeks to explore how important the development of cassava varieties that are high starch yielding (about 75-85% starch of its dry root weight) than the current varieties (around 57.26% starch) sustained industrialization of the cassava sector in Ghana.
Kwame Obeng Dankwa and Bright Boakye Peprah, 2020. Industrialization of Cassava Sector in Ghana: Progress and the Role of Developing High Starch Cassava Varieties. Agricultural Journal, 15: 26-29.