Usually he'll grow other food crops corn, cassava, peanuts to feed his family.
The Plant tissue culture is focusing on other staple foods like cassava, yam, plantain, etc.
Other important C3 crops, such as wheat, sweet potatoes and cassava, could also benefit.
The world grows 190m tonnes a year of cassava, nearly all for food or animal feed.
The hint of sugar from the sweet plantain blended perfectly with the fluffier cassava and the savoury, starchier green plantain.
So Mozambique encouraged its peasant farmers to plant hardier crops, such as cassava, millet and sweet potatoes, instead.
Now two viruses cassava mosaic disease and brown streak disease are destroying up to half the crop in areas they infest.
Their cassava mofongo was particularly light, tasting like flash-fried crispy mashed potato.
Piled high with cassava, cuajo (stewed pork stomach) and longaniza (Spanish sausage), the dishes took up an entire table inside the creek-side bungalow.
Another is that planting stem cuttings, the usual way of propagating cassava, passes down disease more readily than propagation by seeds.
If you did not look too closely, this mofongo relleno could have passed as a chicken potpie, with the cassava masquerading as pastry crust.
SABMiller, which operates in 37 African countries, is trying to woo homebrew-lovers with sorghum and cassava beers that are consistently good.
One substitute, especially in South Asia, could be cassava - which is known to be tolerant to a range of climate stresses.
In the countryside, people have even taken to eating cassava chips, an empty-calorie food that until recently was used as animal feed.
Farmers band together to hire a lorry to get their cassava or charcoal from the central city of Kikwit to market in Kinshasa.
In the early 1970s, for example, the cassava mealybug, a pale, flat, plant-eating insect, was destroying the staple crop of 200 million Africans.
My cassava version carried abundantly flavourful chicken, stewed in a garlicky creamy white sauce made with lashings of butter and white wine and speckled with herbs.
But a Pleistocene version of the scene in my kitchen, with ground cassava roots instead of pancakes, might be more accurate, if less exciting.
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Plants in this family, which include the rubber tree, castor oil plant and the cassava shrub, are typified by small blossoms, the researchers comment.
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Demand for SAB's Impala, the world's first commercially produced cassava beer, brewed in Mozambique, is already outstripping supply after its launch four months ago.
The first synthetic maize was released in Kenya in 1961 and even lowly cassava, a starchy root vegetable, benefited from genetic embellishments in the 1970s.
In areas where adults are reduced to eating just one meal a day, babies are fed little more than flavored cassava root or a thin gruel.
Then she weeded her yams and cassava where they grew in the soft, dark earth and watered the pineapple plant that marked the centre of her plot.
The civil-defence authorities have imported cassava to plant from Brazil, and plan a fortnightly food parcel to each family in the interior for the next six months.
Turning to pineapple production from maize and cassava promised average returns of more than 1, 200%, according to a 1999 study by Markus Goldstein and Christopher Udry of Yale University.
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They told of police cropdusters dousing their cassava, maize and livestock with the herbicides used against coca, and paraded relatives said to have been made ill by the chemicals.
Peace has allowed farmers to get on with their job: agricultural production has grown by almost 9% annually for the past four years, which means more corn and cassava on Mozambican plates.
The result is that cassava remains a subsistence crop in Africa, but in Asia is something on which you can build a business (it can also be used to make clothing, paper and biofuels).
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