Malanje - Angola spends around US$428 million per year on buying wheat, the representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Guertha Barreto said in Malanje Friday.
Addressing the FAO's vision to boost cassava as food of the 21st century, at the first International Cassava Congress, she said that the amount spent could have been applied to the local production and industrialisation of the product, whose derivatives, such as flour, can replace wheat.
Wheat is essentially used to make bread and other pastry products, which can also be processed from cassava, if the tuber is industrialised.
She said that the implementation of the school meals law in Angola is a great opportunity to incorporate cassava in the students' diet, as well as its industrialisation.
He made it known that besides being a food for human, cassava also serves for the manufacture of animal feed and as raw material for a wide range of value added products to flour, as well as pressed wood, paper and textiles, production of sweeteners, fructose, alcohol, high technology starch gel and other by-products.
