Cassava production, marketing and utilization

Production trends and the demand for foods are taken as a useful framework to analyze cassava potential, production, marketing, and utilization in Latin. America. It is shown that to enhance the importance of cassava, it is not only necessary to improve production technology but to also carefully identify potential markets (of which cassava fresh market, processed food and animal feed markets are analyzed), and to develop new marketing channels and processing technology for cassava. The principal issues that should be taken into account in economic research on cassava are defined in a hierarchical manner: (1) agronomic potential of the crop; (2) farming systems; (3) utilization and marketing systems; (4) aggregate demand and production potential. (CIAT)