African Cashew-Nut Producers Seeks to Add Value to Boost Revenue

African cashew-nut producers could triple revenue from exports in the next seven years by increasing processing capacity and adding value to the crop, according to the African Cashew Alliance, an industry group.

The target is to process half of the continent’s cashew crop locally by 2020 from about 10 percent of output currently, Georgette Taraf, the alliance’s president, said on Sept. 17 in an interview in Ghana’s capital, Accra.

Economies in Africa are seeking to remove bottlenecks hindering growth in the manufacturing industry and help ramp up the processing of raw goods before export. Value addition, as it’s known, helps producers maximize returns and lessen the risk of price fluctuations in commodity markets.

Ivory Coast, the top cashew-nut exporter in sub-Saharan Africa, produces about 450,000 tons of the crop a year, followed by Guinea Bissau at 150,000 tons and Tanzania at 140,000 tons, Xenia Defontaine, public relations manager for the alliance, said in an interview in Accra yesterday.

Other producers on the continent are Benin, Nigeria, Mozambique and Ghana, Kenya, Guinea,Madagascar, Senegal and Burkina Faso, according the Food and Agriculture Organization.

“In Ivory Coast, we target to process about half of our entire cashew crop within three years,” Jean Claude Brou, the country’s minister of industry and mines, said in an interview on Sept. 16.

Source: Bloomberg