Ghana wants more for his anacardos, but it’s a hard nut

The Seller of Accra Street looks at me, bewildered.

I am trying to establish how the stocking bag of 30 g of roasted anacardos that is selling, next to a suffocating road in the capital of Ghana, it costs me the equivalent of approximately 75 cents (60p).

Obviously, that is not much money for me, a visitor from the United Kingdom, but I am surprised by marking.

The price is at least 4,000% higher than the cost of buying the same weight of raw anacards and not covered with a Ghanian farmer.

“It’s amazing,” protest. However, she does not understand my English or my reasoning.

The price of nuts was, after all, printed on the package. And explaining why I thought I was beyond the pale would never be easy.

Ghana is the world The third largest exporter of unprocessed anacardos, behind the Ivory coast in the first place, and Cambodia in second.

To produce the harvest, around 300,000 Ghanaians make at least part of their anacardos living in growth.

Nashiru Seydou, whose family has a farm in the northeast of the country, about 500 miles (800 km) from ACCRA, is one of them.

He says that work is hard, and unreliable supply chains and wholesale volatile prices hinder survival.

“We are fighting. We can use sunlight, fertile land, to create more jobs,” he says. “It would be happy if the government comes to our aid and helps support our industry.”

He tells me that he currently obtains around $ 50 for a large sack of non -covered anacardos of 100 kg.

“It’s surprising,” says Bright Simons, an entrepreneur and economic commentator at Accra, who has studied the numbers. “Toasterors and retailers buy farmers’ nuts for $ 500 per ton and sell to customers (both at home and abroad) for amounts between $ 20,000 and $ 40,000 per ton.”

In general, Ghana grows around 180,000 tons of anacardos annually. More than 80%is exported, and in a raw and without peel. This generates about $ 300 million in export revenues, but means that Ghana loses significantly higher yields obtained from roasted and ready to eat anacardos.

Mildred Akotia is a person who tries to increase the number of anacardos that are bombed and roast in Ghana. She is the founder and executive director of Akwaaba Fine Foods, who currently processes only 25 tons per year.

Mrs. Akotia denies any suggestion that she and others like her are in danger. The packaging and roasted machinery that a western business would use automatically in this industry, he says, is beyond the reach of it due to the high credit cost in Ghana.

“If you go to a local bank, it will cost a 30% interest to get a loan,” he complains. “As a manufacturer, he tells me how great his margins are that he can pay that interest? We have had to trust what we can get: soft loans of relatives and grants of donor agencies.”

She says that this situation is the reason why less than 20% of Ghana’s anacardos are processed locally. Aids are collected and exported to large factories in countries such as India, Thailand and Vietnam.

Surprisingly, some of those packaged nuts are exported back to Ghana, where they are sold for the same price as roasted anacards nationwide. This despite the round -loading trip of 20,000 miles and import costs.

It is a similar image for rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and is sold at low prices, although Ghana also increases the crop itself.

In 2016, the Ghanaian government experienced with a prohibition of export of raw anacardos to encourage their own harvest processing. However, the policy had to be abandoned within a couple of weeks after the fuss of farmers and merchants.

Without cheap loans available, it was not possible for new Ghanaian toaster to enter the market. Then, the price of raw nuts crashed, and many began to rot due to lack of a buyer.

More recently, there has been spoken of higher tariffs on exports of raw anacardos and the prohibitions of exporters who buy anacardos directly from farms.

But all these political interventions lose a key point, according to Mr. Simons. A great challenge for local producers, he says, is to work harder in the basic concepts of doing business and growing their companies.

“To be efficient in this, you need a scale,” he says, and adds that companies need to promote anacardos to be more generalized in the country. “You need many Ghanaians who consume nuts, not just a small middle class.”

Professor Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist, agrees that building a strong local market is important for the Ghana Anacardos industry. He was one of last year’s winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his work in the struggles facing low -income economies and, in particular, his local businesses.

However, he says that the first priority should be to improve access to international markets for processed ghane anacardos.

“These companies are dealing with labor forces that are not properly skilled, have infrastructure that do not work, constantly are afraid of corrupt officials or rules changes, and it is also very difficult to reach foreign markets, he says.” They need the foreign market because the domestic market is small and their own government has very little capacity (to boost it). “

He also wants to see the Ghana government improve the road and rail network to relieve the cost of transport.

But Simons acknowledges that responsibility should now be in the Ghanaian companies, to do the basics to improve the brand and commercialization of Anacardos. As it is, he says, many of the country’s most entrepreneurs simply leave Ghana to obtain better paid opportunities due to bureaucracy and chronicle in Ghana are very prohibitive.

“There is a massive brain leak,” he says. “My theory of why the economic development of Africa has been slow is because we focus too much on the supply side, but true beauty is in demand, creating a consumer class of enthusiasts of eating anacardos, and you do not have a class business that can create demand transformation. “

He says that the same argument applies to the other largest exports of Ghana, such as gold and chocolate, none of which has a lot of addition to Ghana before exporting to the West.

Mildred Akotia hopes that he can be one of those companies to reduce the trend. Now he wants to build his own logistics arm, to be able to process the anacardos directly from the door of the farm.

“I have many calls from the EAU, from Canada and America. We cannot meet demand. We cannot obtain enough nuclei to roast.

“There is a local market both local and internationally. My brand is good, my marketing is good. My dream is to give a washing in the face of Ghanese processed foods.”