The Accra road dealer appears at me, bemused.
I'm attempting to set up how the instead flimsy 30g bag of roasted cashew nuts she's selling, beside a sweltering toll road in Ghana's capital, expenses me the equal of about seventy five cents (60p).
That's needless to say now not a lot of cash for me, a traveller from the UK, however I'm amazed at the mark up.
The charge is at least 4,000% greater than the value of shopping for the equal weight of raw, unshelled cashews from a Ghanian farmer.
"It's incredible," I protest. Yet she does not recognize my English, or my reasoning.
The charge of the nuts was, after all, printed on the packet. And explaining why I concept it used to be past the faded was once by no means going to be easy. Ghana is the world's third-biggest exporter of unprocessed cashew nuts, at the back of Ivory Coast in first place, and Cambodia in second.
To produce the crop, round 300,000 Ghanaians make at least phase of their residing developing cashews.
Nashiru Seydou, whose household have a farm in the country's north-east, some five hundred miles (800km) from Accra, is one of them.
He says the work is hard, and unreliable provide chains and unstable wholesale costs make survival difficult.
"We are struggling. We can use the sunlight, the fertile land, to create greater jobs," he says. "I'd be completely happy if the authorities comes to our resource and helps help our industry."
He tells me that he presently receives round $50 for a giant 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 shops purchase the nuts from farmers for $500 a tonne, and promote to clients [both at domestic and abroad] for quantities between $20,000 and $40,000 a tonne."
As a whole, Ghana grows about 180,000 tonnes of cashews annually. More than 80% is exported, and in raw, unshelled form. This generates some $300m in export revenues, however skill that Ghana misses out on the considerably greater returns you get from roasted, ready-to-eat cashews.
Mildred Akotia is one man or woman attempting to make bigger the quantity of cashews that are shelled and roasted in Ghana. She is the founder and CEO of Akwaaba Fine Foods, which presently approaches simply 25 tonnes a year.
Ms Akotia denies any recommendation that she and others like her are price-gouging. The packaging and roasting equipment a western enterprise would routinely use in this industry, she says, is out of attain for her due to the fact of the excessive price of credit score in Ghana.
"If you go to a nearby bank, it will fee you 30% hobby to get a loan," she complains. "As a producer you inform me how massive your margins are that you can have enough money that sort of interest? We've had to be counted on what we can get: smooth loans from family and provides from donor agencies."
She says that this state of affairs is why much less than 20% of Ghana's cashews are processed locally. The bulk are scooped up and exported to large factories in nations like India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Remarkably, some of these packaged nuts are then exported lower back to Ghana, where they are offered for the identical rate as domestically roasted cashews. This is regardless of the 20,000-mile sea freight spherical trip, and import costs.
It is a comparable photo for rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and bought at low prices, no matter Ghana additionally growing the crop itself.Back in 2016 the Ghanaian authorities experimented with an export ban on uncooked cashews in order to inspire homegrown processing. However the policy had to be deserted inside a couple of weeks after uproar from farmers and traders.
Without reachable low-cost loans, it wasn't feasible for enough new Ghanaian roasters to enter the market. So the fee of uncooked nuts crashed, and many started out rotting for choose of a buyer.
More currently there has been discuss of multiplied tariffs on uncooked cashew exports and bans on exporters buying cashews immediately from farms.
But all these coverage interventions pass over a key point, in accordance to Mr Simons. A large mission for nearby producers, he says, is to work more difficult on the fundamentals of doing business, and developing their companies.
"In order to be environment friendly at this, you want scale," he says, adding that companies want to promote ingesting cashews to make it greater enormous in the country. "You want a lot of a Ghanaians ingesting the nuts, now not simply a small center class".
Prof Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist, is of the same opinion that constructing a robust neighborhood market is vital for Ghana's cashew industry. He used to be one of remaining year's winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his work on the struggles dealing with low-income economies, and in unique their home-grown businesses.
Yet he says that the first precedence need to be enhancing get admission to to global markets for processed Ghanaian cashews.
"These corporations are dealing with workforces that don't seem to be true skilled, they have infrastructures that are not working, they are continuously in worry of corrupt officials, or rule changes, and additionally it is very challenging to attain overseas markets, he says. "They want the overseas market due to the fact the home market is small, and their personal authorities has very little capability [to improve it]."
He additionally needs to see the Ghanaian authorities enhance the community of roads and railways to ease the fee of transportation. But Mr Simons reckons the onus must now be on Ghanaian agencies themselves, to do the fundamentals to decorate the branding and advertising and marketing of cashews. As it is, he says, many of the country's most enterprising commercial enterprise human beings are simply leaving Ghana for higher paid possibilities overseas due to the fact of the crimson tape and cronyism in Ghana are so prohibitive.
"There's a large intelligence drain," he says. "My principle of why Africa's financial improvement has been gradual is due to the fact we center of attention too tons on the furnish side, however the actual splendor is in demand, developing a ingesting classification of cashew-eating enthusiasts, and you do not have an entrepreneurial category that can create demand transformation."
He says the equal argument applies to Ghana's different better exports, like gold and chocolate, neither of which receives a lot value-addition inside Ghana earlier than getting exported to the West.
Mildred Akotia hopes she may be one of these entrepreneurs to buck the trend. She now desires to construct her very own logistics arm, to be in a position to technique the cashews direct from the farm gate.
"I have a lot of calls from the UAE, from Canada and America. Currently we cannot meet demand. We cannot get adequate kernels to roast.
"There's a equipped market each regionally and internationally. My branding is good, my advertising is good. My dream is to provide a facelift to Ghanaian processed foods.
© 2025 The Lucas Tribune By K.L.P Entertainment
© 2025 Kennedy Lucas Publishings LLC
© 2025 The Office Of Kennedy Lucas Patterson
© 2025 The Lucas Tech Company
Comments