Ghana needs extra for its cashews, however it’s a tricky nut to crack | EUROtoday
Business reporter, BBC News

The Accra road vendor appears to be like at me, bemused.
I’m making an attempt to determine how the reasonably flimsy 30g bag of roasted cashew nuts she’s promoting, beside a sweltering freeway in Ghana’s capital, prices me the equal of about 75 cents (60p).
That’s clearly not some huge cash for me, a customer from the UK, however I’m amazed on the mark up.
The worth is a minimum of 4,000% greater than the price of shopping for the identical weight of uncooked, unshelled cashews from a Ghanian farmer.
“It’s incredible,” I protest. Yet she does not perceive my English, or my reasoning.
The worth of the nuts was, in any case, printed on the packet. And explaining why I believed it was past the pale was by no means going to be straightforward.
Ghana is the world’s third-biggest exporter of unprocessed cashew nuts, behind Ivory Coast in first place, and Cambodia in second.
To produce the crop, round 300,000 Ghanaians make a minimum of a part of their residing rising cashews.
Nashiru Seydou, whose household have a farm within the nation’s north-east, some 500 miles (800km) from Accra, is considered one of them.
He says the work is tough, and unreliable provide chains and unstable wholesale costs make survival tough.
“We are struggling. We can use the sunlight, the fertile land, to create more jobs,” he says. “I’d be happy if the government comes to our aid and helps support our industry.”
He tells me that he at the moment will get round $50 for a big 100kg sack of unshelled cashews.

“It’s amazing,” says Bright Simons, an entrepreneur and financial commentator in Accra, who has studied the numbers. “Roasters and retailers buy the nuts from farmers for $500 a tonne, and sell to customers [both at home and abroad] for amounts between $20,000 and $40,000 a tonne.”
As an entire, Ghana grows about 180,000 tonnes of cashews yearly. More than 80% is exported, and in uncooked, unshelled kind. This generates some $300m in export revenues, however signifies that Ghana misses out on the considerably greater returns you get from roasted, ready-to-eat cashews.
Mildred Akotia is one particular person making an attempt to extend the quantity of cashews which might be shelled and roasted in Ghana. She is the founder and CEO of Akwaaba Fine Foods, which at the moment processes simply 25 tonnes a yr.
Ms Akotia denies any suggestion that she and others like her are price-gouging. The packaging and roasting equipment a western enterprise would robotically use on this trade, she says, is out of attain for her due to the excessive value of credit score in Ghana.
“If you go to a local bank, it will cost you 30% interest to get a loan,” she complains. “As a manufacturer you tell me how large your margins are that you can afford that kind of interest? We’ve had to rely on what we can get: soft loans from relatives and grants from donor agencies.”
She says that this case is why lower than 20% of Ghana’s cashews are processed regionally. The bulk are scooped up and exported to massive factories in international locations like India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Remarkably, a few of these packaged nuts are then exported again to Ghana, the place they’re bought for a similar worth as domestically roasted cashews. This is regardless of the 20,000-mile sea freight spherical journey, and import prices.
It is the same image for rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and bought at low costs, regardless of Ghana additionally rising the crop itself.

Back in 2016 the Ghanaian authorities experimented with an export ban on uncooked cashews with a view to encourage homegrown processing. However the coverage needed to be deserted inside a few weeks after uproar from farmers and merchants.
Without obtainable low cost loans, it wasn’t attainable for adequate new Ghanaian roasters to enter the market. So the worth of uncooked nuts crashed, and plenty of began rotting for need of a purchaser.
More just lately there was speak of elevated tariffs on uncooked cashew exports and bans on exporters buying cashews immediately from farms.
But all these coverage interventions miss a key level, in keeping with Mr Simons. An enormous problem for native producers, he says, is to work tougher on the fundamentals of doing enterprise, and rising their corporations.
“In order to be efficient at this, you need scale,” he says, including that companies want to advertise consuming cashews to make it extra widespread within the nation. “You need a lot of a Ghanaians consuming the nuts, not just a small middle class”.
Prof Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist, agrees that constructing a robust native market is essential for Ghana’s cashew trade. He was considered one of final yr’s winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his work on the struggles going through low-income economies, and particularly their home-grown companies.
Yet he says that the primary precedence ought to be enhancing entry to worldwide markets for processed Ghanaian cashews.
“These firms are dealing with workforces that aren’t properly skilled, they have infrastructures that aren’t working, they are constantly in fear of corrupt officials, or rule changes, and also it’s very difficult to reach foreign markets, he says. “They want the international market as a result of the home market is small, and their very own authorities has little or no capability [to boost it].”
He also wants to see the Ghanaian government improve the network of roads and railways to ease the cost of transportation.

But Mr Simons reckons the onus should now be on Ghanaian businesses themselves, to do the basics to enhance the branding and marketing of cashews. As it is, he says, many of the country’s most enterprising business people are just leaving Ghana for better paid opportunities abroad because of the red tape and cronyism in Ghana are so prohibitive.
“There’s an enormous mind drain,” he says. “My principle of why Africa’s financial improvement has been sluggish is as a result of we focus an excessive amount of on the provision aspect, however the actual magnificence is in demand, making a consuming class of cashew-eating fanatics, and you do not have an entrepreneurial class that may create demand transformation.”
He says the same argument applies to Ghana’s other bigger exports, like gold and chocolate, neither of which gets much value-addition within Ghana before getting exported to the West.
Mildred Akotia hopes she might be one of those entrepreneurs to buck the trend. She now wants to build her own logistics arm, to be able to process the cashews direct from the farm gate.
“I’ve quite a lot of calls from the UAE, from Canada and America. Currently we won’t meet demand. We cannot get sufficient kernels to roast.
“There’s a ready market both locally and internationally. My branding is good, my marketing is good. My dream is to give a facelift to Ghanaian processed foods.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5y1r189m0o