Twenty incubatees are updating their skills in a bid to boost the practice of second generation agriculture.

With the creation of the Pilot Incubation Centre (Cip), Bonaberi in 2010, transformation has improved significantly. Not only is cassava being transformed, other food crops like nodules, and flour has joined the trend.

Aligned with this effort are 20 incubatees whose skills are being updated, thereby consecrating the country’s food self sufficiency and creating job opportunities.

With two experts from the India-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Icrisat, a skills enhancing session from March 3-6, christened “Incubator management and technology standardisation,” by the Cameroon Chamber of Commerce in Douala will help improve on agriculture, especially the transformation of cassava chips, cassava semolina (akwakwa), nodules and flour.

As concerns cassava, 1,040 tons has been transformed since 2010. Fifteen tons of cassava fibre (peelings) has been produced during the period as butane gas.

Focus of the skills enhancing session is on food processing and production particularly quality management systems and general principles of food hygiene. Tefack Yves, Cip Chief said participants will also learn product development and quality control with focus on cassava based value added products, agribusiness incubation, hazards analysis and critical control point system and guidelines for its application, as well as basics of business incubation.

The priority objective sought is to ensure the food self-sufficiency of households and the entire nation, as well as ensure transformation in the country. For that, Cameroon has significant assets and varied potentials such as arable land, its agro-ecological diversity and abundant rainfall.

Their development is at the heart of second-generation agriculture, the foundations of which were laid by the President of the Republic during the Ebolowa Agro-pastoral Show in January 2011.