The plight of our cashew nut farmers makes a mockery of the fact that our country is one of the largest producers of the cash crop in the East African region, exporting more than 60,000 metric tonnes every year. The farmers continue to wallow in abject poor, when they should be enjoying the fruit of their labour.
About 80 per cent of the produce is exported in raw form, and, therefore, fetches prices that are 20 per cent lower than if processed. A tonne of raw cashew fetches $1,200, while that of processed nuts goes for $5,000 in the world market. Unfortunately the story is the same for other crops.
Countries such as India, where most of the raw nuts are exported, have been cashing in handsomely by processing, packaging and selling the nuts to lucrative markets in the US, Europe and Japan. But there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel, as the government and other stakeholders, including private companies, are now determined to increase the processing capacity. To begin with the government has increased the raw cashew nut export duty from 10 per cent to 15 per cent to encourage processing locally.
As we welcome the government’s decision, we think a lot more should be done to put the country in a comfortable situation. The local processing capacity is still minimal. There is a need to enable small-scale farmers to semi-process their produces in order to get better prices.
Some cooperatives in Mtwara have already acquired small processing plants, but they lack access to loans to buy more plants. Efforts should also be made to revive collapsed processing and packaging plants to increase the capacity of large processors.The drive to increase local processing capacity should also go together with widening the search for new markets. There is an increasing middle-class in emerging economies of Brazil, China and India and Russia, which our producers should target. Being a country with friendly ties we all these countries, here is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.
One of the reasons why Tanzania and other African countries are filthy poor is their inability to exploit their vast potential in natural resources. Revamping agro-processing is a way out of this stagnation (The Citizen, Thursday, 22 July 2010 08:52).
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