“It’s amazing,” says Bright Simons, an entrepreneur and economic 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 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, but means that Ghana misses out on the significantly higher returns you get from roasted, ready-to-eat cashews.
Mildred Akotia is one person trying to increase the amount of cashews that are shelled and roasted in Ghana. She is the founder and CEO of Akwaaba Fine Foods, which currently processes just 25 tonnes a year.
Ms Akotia denies any suggestion that she and others like her are price-gouging. The packaging and roasting machinery a western business would automatically use in this industry, she says, is out of reach for her because of the high cost of credit 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 situation is why less than 20% of Ghana’s cashews are processed locally. The bulk are scooped up and exported to big factories in countries like India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Remarkably, some of those packaged nuts are then exported back to Ghana, where they are sold for the same price as domestically roasted cashews. This is despite the 20,000-mile sea freight round trip, and import costs.
It is a similar picture for rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and sold at low prices, despite Ghana also growing the crop itself.
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