Presently, only 10 per cent of the total harvested raw cashew nuts is processed in the country, with 90 per cent exported to other countries due to lack of capacity.
Another challenge confronting the industry, which seems to have defied solutions, is the waste of cashew fruits, as estimated eight million tonnes of the fruits are wasted yearly.
The Secretary-General, National Cashew Association of Nigeria (NCAN), Anga Sotonye, who confirmed this, said: “when it comes to the raw cashew nuts, in terms of processing, what we process is under the neighbourhood of 10 per cent, about 90 per cent of our total raw nuts are shipped to other countries that processed and then exported finished back to Nigeria. That has been the situation.”
Sotonye linked the problem to many challenges, including lack of capacity in procurement of processing plants.
The President of the African Cashew Alliance (ACA), Babatola Faseru, who corroborated this, said that processing factories in Africa are still faced with challenges that limit their production.
Such challenges, he said, include issues of inadequate access to finance, lack of processing equipment, technical knowledge and skills, storage systems, among others, resulting in processing less than 10 per cent of its total production.
In 2019, the Federal Government announced plans to set up six cashew processing plants in four states, following the rejection of 37,000mt of the commodity exported to Vietnam, in addition to 67,000mt reportedly stuck in warehouse in Nigeria.
The then Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh, said the move would create long term solution to the delay in export and stocking of cashew nuts at the ports, saying it will make Nigeria exporter of finished products and not raw materials.
The states are: Enugu, Benue, Kogi and Oyo. “The challenge is usually access to credit because a good processing cashew line will cost you about $2m to do something like 10 to 20 tonnes a day. The target is to set up at least one plant each in Enugu and Benue, two plants each in Kogi and Oyo states, these are the leading cashew producers now.
“We want to assure the cashew stakeholders that in our next level activities, we intend to stop the export of raw nuts and to process all our cashews here and we hope by the grace of God, to have one or two plants ready before year 2020. We are talking with the Brazilians now. We want to bring in machines from Brazil to process the cashew fruits into juice which has a high content of vitamin C,” Ogbeh said then.
But three years down the lane, nothing has been achieved, as it appears the dream died with the exit of the minister.
According to Faseru, cashew can be a key economic driver for the country, but research and technologies are required to improve seed varieties and breeding. “Can we arguably say that our farmers are following the appropriate post-harvest practices to minimize losses and wastage?
“Talking about processing, we witnessed especially in 2020 the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the processing sector. To a large extent, however, the resilience and increasing global demand for cashews, particularly in the US, Europe, China and the Middle East, kept the cashew industry strong and stable with the net export of cashew kernels increasing by about 10 per cent over that of the previous year,” he said.
To Sotonye, if government could provide the enabling environment that would give life to prosperous cashew economy, the country would generate more revenue in the aspect of foreign exchange, as bigger market will be created for cashew.
“When you are in cashew processing, your competitors are global and in most of these countries processing cashew, they have stable electricity and their governments give them incentives. So, the incentives drive down the cost of doing business and as a Nigerian competing with these other countries, what type of incentives do you enjoy to give you that kind of comparative advantage? It’s just non-existent.
“As a government, as a country, we begin to look at the cashew sector as a key economic driver, as an economic enabler, as something that’ll create job for our people and help diversify the economy, then, we have to be strategic in our approach. There are several by-products you can get out of cashew, if government brings out fund to set up cashew processing factory, which must be long term finance, this will assist the sector.”
