Ghana wants more for her cashew but it’s a hard nut to crack

The seller on Akra Street looks at me, embarrassed.

I try to determine how the very unclear 30G cashew nut bag it sells, to the predominant highway in the capital of Ghana, costs me the equivalent of about 75 cents (60p).

This is obviously not much money for me, a visitor from the UK, but I am amazed at the marking.

The price is at least 4000% higher than the cost of buying the same weight of raw, freezing cashew by a Gansan farmer.

“It’s amazing,” I’m protesting. Yet she does not understand my English or my reasoning.

In the end, the price of nuts was printed on the package. And explaining why I thought it was beyond pale it would never be easy.

Ghana is the world Third -sized exporter From untreated cashew nuts, behind the coast of ivory in the first place and Cambodia in second place.

To produce the harvest, about 300,000 gannis make at least some of their live growing cashews.

Cashir Seidu, whose family has a farm in the northeastern part of the country, about 500 miles (800 km) of acre, is one of them.

He says work is difficult, and unreliable supply chains and variable wholesale prices make it difficult to survive.

“We are fighting. We can use the sunlight, the fertile land, to create more jobs,” he says. “I would be glad if our government came to the rescue and help support our industry.”

He tells me that he is currently getting about $ 50 for a large 100 kg bag of uncovered cashews.

“It’s amazing,” says Bright Simons, an entrepreneur and economic commentator in an acre who studied the numbers. “Retail bakers and retailers buy farmers’ nuts for $ 500 per tonne and sell to customers (both at home and abroad) for amounts between $ 20,000 and $ 40,000 per tonne.”

Ghana generally grows about 180,000 tonnes of cashew a year. More than 80% is also exported in raw form. This generates about $ 300 million in export revenue, but means that Ghana misses the significantly higher returns you get from baked, ready-to-eat cashew.

Mildred Acia is one person who tries to increase the amount of cashews that are fired and baked in Ghana. She is the founder and CEO of Akwaaba Fine Foods, which currently processes only 25 tonnes a year.

Mrs. Akotia denies any suggestion that she and others like her have prices. The packaging and baking machines that the Western business would automatically use in this industry, according to her, is inaccessible to it because of the high cost of loan in Ghana.

“If you go to a local bank, it will cost you a 30% interest rate to get a loan,” she complains. “As a manufacturer, you tell me how big your margins are that you can afford such an interest? We had to rely on what we can get: soft loans from relatives and grants from donor agencies.”

She says this situation is why less than 20% of Ghana cashew are processed locally. The bigger part are cut and exported to large factories in countries such as India, Thailand and Vietnam.

It is remarkable that some of these packaged nuts are then exported back to Ghana, where they are sold at the same price as baked in the country cashew. This is despite the trip of marine loads of 20,000 miles and the costs of imports.

This is a similar picture for Rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and is sold at low prices, although Ghana also grows the harvest itself.

Back in 2016, the Ghana government experimented with a ban on raw cashew exports to encourage home processing. However, the policy had to be abandoned within a few weeks of growing by farmers and traders.

Without cheap loans, it was not possible for new Ghanai bakers to enter the market. Thus, the price of raw nuts collapsed and many began to rot to ask for a buyer.

Most recently, there has been talk of increased raw cashew export tariffs and bans on exporters buying cashew directly from the farms.

But all these political interventions miss a key moment, according to Simons. According to him, a big challenge for local manufacturers is to work more on the foundations of business and growing their companies.

“To be effective in this, you need a scale,” he says, adding that companies need to encourage cashew eating to make it wider in the country. “You need many ghants who consume nuts, not just a small middle class.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist, agrees that building a strong local market is important for the cashew industry in Ghana. He was one of last year’s winners in the Nobel Memorial Award for Economic Sciences, for his work on the fights that have low-income economies, and in particular their home rearing business.

However, he says the first priority should be to improve access to international markets for processed Ghanski cashew.

“These companies are engaged in labor that are not properly qualified, they have infrastructures that do not work, they are constantly afraid of corrupt employees or change changes, and it is also very difficult to reach foreign markets,” he says. ” They need the foreign market because the internal market is small and their own government has a very small capacity (to strengthen it). “

He also wants to see the Ghana government to improve the network of roads and railways to ease the cost of transport.

But Simons believes that he should now be the Ghana -based businesses to make the foundations for improving the branding and marketing of cashews. As he is, he said, many of the most accepted businessmen in the country simply leave Ghana for better paid opportunities abroad because of the bureaucracy and kronism in Ghana are so excessive.

“There is a massive brain leak,” he says. “My theory of why Africa’s economic development is slow is because we focus too much on the side of supply, but true beauty is in search, creating a consumer class of cashew enthusiasts, and you do not have an entrepreneurial class that can create Search transformation. “

He says the same argument applies to the other greater export of Ghana, such as gold and chocolate, none of which receives much supplement in Ghana before being exported to the West.

Mildred Acia hopes that she can be one of those entrepreneurs to reduce the trend. She now wants to build her own logistics hand so that she can process the cashew directly from the farm.

“I have a lot of calls from the UAE, from Canada and America. We can’t answer the search at the moment. We can’t get enough cores to bake.

“There is a ready market both local and internationally. My branding is good, my marketing is good. My dream is to give facelift to the Ghana processed foods.”