My Beauty Best Teacher

From Terry Talks Duncan McNicholl of Engineers without Borders discusses value chains:

Cassava is an excellent crop for conditions in Malawi and has the potential to vastly improve food security in famine-prone regions of the country. The difficulty is that the crop has little market value and many farmers are not interested in producing it because of this.
However, cassava has the potential to be processed into flour, which can be used as a substitute for wheat in baking products and also for the traditional Malawian meal, nsima. With rising wheat prices and crop failures limiting the production of maize flour, processed cassava is beginning to have promising market potential...[continue reading]

In the Guardian Jeevan Vasagar reviews Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook:

I long for the day when an Asian history can be written without mentioning curry - but perhaps it can't be done. Here, food makes all the connections. For Alibhai-Brown's children, Africa is beautiful but distressingly violent and poor. Knowledge of its languages fades with time. But just as food crosses barriers between cultures, so it passes history down the generations to her son and daughter. The cuisine recorded here blends Africa and Asia: there are plantains with peanut curry, posho and rice. The first recipe is for fried mogo, cassava chips with salt and chilli, a hallmark of her people's cuisine. Its presence on an Indian wedding menu in Britain is a sure sign that the caterers are Ugandan Asians...[continue reading]

...she argues that religious and motivational books have overwhelmed the nation's reading imagination, the new trend she describes as dangerous since knowledge from such areas does not direct the growth that a nation like Nigeria needs. Nigerians, she contends, need to read creative works so as to be able to question the leaders as to how they are led...a country does not move forward through reading motivational books nor is it going to move forward through religious texts. The people might move spiritually but that's about it. We need books that allow us to question the very fabric of our existence and imagine a different world than what we have now. And, I don't think we might find that in motivational books or religious texts.

The BBC reports on Calestous Juma's new book New Harvest,where he contends:

that there is great scope to expand crops traditionally grown in Africa, such as millet, sorghum, cassava or yams.He sees areas where farmers will need to adapt to tackle a changing climate - cereal farmers may switch into livestock, he says, while others may chose more radical options."Tree crops like breadfruit, which is from the Pacific, could be introduced in Africa because trees are more resistant to climate change."...[continue reading]

Yara Prize winner Florence Wambugu discusses impediments to African agriculture.In an answer to a question about her focus on Bananas she stated:

Bananas are an orphan crop, like cassava, sorghum or sweet potato. It hasn't received the same attention as the crops used for export. But it is very important for food security, very important for women and children. When I was growing up, for example, banana was a baby food.
I realised when I looked around that the technology existed to double the yield and help poor farmers come out of poverty. So I brought together people from all along the value chain — businesses, farming communities, scientists — in what I call a participatory bottom-up approach. It is this holistic approach in linking farmers to the market that has brought success...[continue reading]

Scarlett Lion highlights an endearing NYTimes report about home cooked food:

During the week she hews to African cuisine because, she said, it is healthier than American food. “My whole family is skinny,” she explained. It’s also because African cuisine is all her husband will eat.
Ms. Gray-Brumskine often makes fufu, a rib-sticking mash of potato starch and mashed potatoes from a box, a common American substitution for roots or yams that are used in Africa. She also makes cassava greens; she washes and grinds the leaves, then boils them in a pot with water and baking soda until they turn olive green — a process that can take two hours and often isn’t done until 11 at night. Her husband will wait and eat them then...[continue reading]

AllAfrica reported via the Champion the welcome establishment of Nigeria's 1st commodity exchange(The Abuja commodity exchange)."...ASCE which would trade in spot transactions for high quality grains such as white and yellow maize, soyabeans, cowpea, benniseed and millet, as well as cassava and sorghum.In the light of the development the exchange has invited commodity brokers and warehouse and assaying firms to partner with it in the areas of dealership and warehousing..."The Nigerian SEC should take note of the success deregulation has brought the derivatives industry in India .Broader based competition and demutualisation is needed in the exchange industry as a whole,private industry should be encouraged to step in and begin the process of establishing more regional exchanges in markets across the board. Whither the Aba stock exchange, Ibaden Cocoa exchange, Abakaliki Yam exchange et. al ?

The Economist reports on the challenges faced by publishers:

Nigeria was once the centre of literary publishing in west Africa—not just for local companies but international houses as well. But when military rule and economic decline saw much of the middle class flee in the 1980s, the publishers left too. Today, there is no distribution network and scant demand for fiction...Cassava Republic, a publisher founded in 2006, operates with a low profit margin for now, in the hope that it can cultivate a loyal base of readers that will one day meet costs. The founder, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, says she wants her customers' “intellectual hunger to be as pressing as their stomachs”.

Biopact reports:

Mozambique has only recently begun to understand that it is a 'biofuel superpower'. Its agro-ecological resources allow for the production of a wide range of efficient energy crops, including eucalyptus, grasses, starch crops like cassava, or sugarcane and jatropha. Analysts affiliated with the International Energy Agency estimate that the country can produce around 7 Exajoules of biofuels sustainably that is roughly 3.1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day

As an African writer, I pluck what I know and throw it into a pot with what I don't and what I conjure out of nothing and dreams. I shake in all sorts of spices, grains, water, salt and lies, African or not, and try to create a new stew with new flavours every time. I ask my audience to demand this much of me and other African writers. To expect so much more than yesterday's leftovers: the newspapers' diarrhoeic stream of problems and problematic stories. Let's imagine together all the possible and impossible ways individuals try to make sense of themselves and their worlds, African or otherwise.