List of Agro-Industrial By-Products and their Uses

Regarding agro-industrial by-products, cottonseed for instance has been the most used. However, it has been observed that availability is dwindling. There has been a significant drop in production of this by-product, directly related to cotton production in West Africa.

After starting in 2004, this decline worsened in 2007 and the trend seems to persist. Global cottonseed supplies amounted to over 2 million ton for the sub-region in 2005, and dropped to only 1.134 million ton in 2009.

Between 75 and 83 percent of the annual output comes from Burkina Faso, Mali and Benin, the leading cotton producers in the sub-region, followed by Côte d’Ivoire.

Cakes are the solid residues obtained after extracting oil from the seeds or oilseed fruits (rich in fat). These are the co-products of crushing, hat is, the industry of oil manufacturing.

At global level, the availability of cakes follows the same trend as cottonseeds. The same countries lead, with Burkina Faso clearly ranked first with between 37 and 50 percent of the total supply, depending on the year.

Nevertheless, in absolute terms, these figures should be treated with caution since the production data for some traditional ginning and seed crushing units are not known.

Moreover, oil yields, and consequently cake yields, vary considerably. While in modern factories they reach 16–20 percent, they are only 8–10 percent in traditional oil mills.

Finally, in some traditional oil mills, the mode of extraction is far from efficient, but could be carried out without separating the shell from the seed.

1. Soybean cake

Even though soybean is a recent and still marginal crop, it is gaining in importance in West Africa.

It seems that in most cotton producing countries, farmers are turning to soybean since it provides them with increased autonomy in their commercial exchanges compared with cotton.

As can be seen in Burkina Faso and Benin, production has increased exponentially in reaction to (or as a consequence of) the decline in cotton production.

2. Groundnut Cake (GNC)

A sharp recovery in groundnut production in Senegal boosted UEMOA production to about 2.5 million ton of groundnut cake in 2009. However, that increase is virtually attributable to Senegal alone within UEMOA.

In comparison, Niger, a former leading groundnut producer, currently produces only 250 000 ton, compared with the more than 1 million ton produced by Senegal.

In fact, in Niger, groundnut oil production is mainly done using traditional methods, and to a lesser extent using semi-modern methods.

Consequently the by-product obtained is marketed in the form of groundnut paste intended for human consumption. A similar situation can be observed in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Thus, these by-products are not traditionally fed to animals in those countries, even though this practice can be observed here and there among individuals.

3. Local Cereal Bran

It is very difficult to obtain figures for local cereal brans due to the key role played by artisanal units in their processing, the number and capacity of which are difficult to obtain.

Moreover, it was not possible to obtain similar data for rice and other grain mills. Consequently, the quantity of bran was estimated based on the conversion factors of the quantities of seeds provided (Kossila, 1988).

It is not surprising that sorghum and millet provide the highest quantities of bran: 1.3 million ton of sorghum bran, and between 1.5 and 1.8 million ton of millet bran, with trends that are naturally similar to those of seed production.

Obviously, the ranking per country remains the same for seeds, and Sahelian countries are still the largest producers of bran cereals.

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To estimate the production of wheat bran, a 0.35 percent coefficient was applied to the quantities of wheat imported in view of the difficulty in obtaining reliable and complete data and since the quasi-totality of processed wheat is imported (sub- regional production is very low).

The results of this estimation are where it can be observed that Senegal and Côte d‘Ivoire produce between 75 and 80 percent of the total production of wheat bran in the sub-region, and that this production has been increasing over the past years.

Burkina Faso and Niger have the lowest production. Their supplies vary from 5 to 7 kg/TLU/year, depending on size of production.

4. Molasses

The production of molasses was estimated based on the production of sugar cane, knowing that during processing, molasses accounts for 3 percent of sugar cane.

The UEMOA region produces approximately 100 000 tonne of molasses yearly, and this production has been stable (Table 19). Within West Africa, Côte d‘Ivoire produces about 45 percent and Senegal 15 percent of the total molasses production.

Mali and Burkina Faso share almost equally the remaining 15 percent. The supplies per TLU are negligible: from 0.5 kg/TLU/year in low producing countries, to 25–30 kg/TLU/year in countries such as Côte d‘Ivoire and Senegal.

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