Where do cashews come from?

In 2024 Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) produced 944,673 tonnes, 22% of the world's 4.2 million tonnes (FAOSTAT). India followed with 19%, then Tanzania (12%), Vietnam (7.2%) and Ghana (5.2%). The top five account for 66%, 35 countries reported output and 15% came from outside the top ten. World production changed +42% over the ten years to 2024 and -2% on the previous year.

These are nuts in shell, the raw material the trade calls RCN. West Africa is now the centre of production: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau form a contiguous belt where cashew is the main cash crop of the savanna transition zone. Tanzania and Mozambique dominate the East African crop, and India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Brazil supply Asia and the Americas.

The tree is undemanding, which is why smallholders plant it: it grows on sandy, degraded ground, needs a long dry season to flower and set, and yields without irrigation. Yields per hectare are low by orchard standards and vary with tree age, spacing and management. Most of the world's cashew comes off farms of a few hectares.

Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) was the largest exporter of raw cashew nuts in shell (HS 080131) in 2024 with 23% of world export value, ahead of Tanzania (17%), on world trade of $3.5 billion (CEPII BACI). Vietnam was the largest importer with 51%.

The kernel line tells the other half of the story. In 2024 Vietnam exported 66% of a shelled cashew trade worth $4.5 billion, and United States was the largest buyer with 24%. On the raw side India took 45% of imports behind the leader.

Read together the two lines describe a triangle. African countries grow and export raw nuts; Vietnam and India import, shell and re-export kernels; North America and Europe eat them. Ivory Coast and India appear on both lines because both export raw nuts and shell some at home.

There is no futures market and no free public benchmark price for cashews, so this site quotes none. Raw nuts and kernels are priced separately. Raw nuts are bought at the farm gate by collectors, in several countries against a minimum price the government announces before the season; Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Tanzania all set one, and enforcement varies. Tanzania sells much of its crop through auctions under a warehouse receipt system.

Kernels are sold on grade against private assessments and negotiated contracts. Grades describe whole white kernels by count per pound, with broken and scorched grades well below, and a contract fixes grade, crop year and shipment window. The gap between the farm gate and kernel prices holds the processing margin, freight and shelling loss.

Processors buy nuts and sell kernels, so what they can pay depends on how many kilograms of good whole kernel a bag yields. Outturn varies with season, origin, drying and storage time, and a poor year squeezes the margin from both ends.

Producing countries intervene heavily. Minimum farm gate prices, levies on raw nut exports and subsidies on kernel exports are used to push shelling onshore. When an announced price sits above what buyers will pay, trade stalls and nuts move across borders instead.

A small number of countries crack most of the world's raw nuts, so their factories' appetite for raw material, and their access to working capital, sets the bid for African crop. When processors are short of credit or long on kernel stock, raw nut prices fall whatever the harvest looked like.

Flowering needs a dry spell, and rain during harvest causes mold and raises the moisture of nuts that must then be dried before shipping. Wet raw nuts store badly, lose outturn and can be rejected on arrival after a voyage of several weeks.

Kernels compete with almonds and other snack nuts in North America, Europe, China and India. Retail promotion, and the substitution that follows when a price gap opens between nut types, moves kernel demand faster than raw nut supply can respond.

The cashew tree carries an odd double fruit: a swollen fleshy stalk, the cashew apple, with the true fruit, a curved grey nut, hanging beneath it. The apple is perishable and mostly stays where it falls. Harvest is by hand, gathering fallen nuts over several weeks, after which they are sun-dried.

Shelling is the hard part, and it is what makes cashew unlike any other nut. Between the shell's layers sits cashew nut shell liquid, a caustic oil containing anacardic acid that blisters skin and corrodes equipment. The shell is softened by steam or by roasting in a bath of the liquid itself, then cut open without breaking the kernel, which is worth far more whole than in pieces.

The kernel is then dried, the thin testa peeled by hand or machine, and the kernels graded by size, color and wholeness before packing under vacuum or nitrogen. Mechanization has advanced in Vietnam, but hand cutting and peeling still account for much of world capacity, which is why shelling follows careful, cheap labor.

Almost all cashew is eaten as kernels: roasted and salted as a snack, whole and broken in confectionery and bakery, ground into butters and into the plant-based cheeses and creams that gave the nut a second market, and used in Indian and Southeast Asian cooking as a thickener.

By-products matter more here than in most nut crops. Cashew nut shell liquid is a genuine industrial feedstock, distilled into cardanol and used in brake and clutch friction linings, resins, surfactants and coatings, and the spent shell is burned as boiler fuel. The cashew apple is fermented into spirits, notably feni in Goa, though most is left in the field.

The chain has an unusual geography: nuts grown in Africa are shipped to Asia in bags inside containers, shelled, and shipped out again as kernels, so one nut can cross the Indian Ocean twice before it is eaten. That works only because shelling is labor-intensive enough for freight to be small beside the wage difference.

Raw nuts leave through Abidjan, San Pédro, Tema, Cotonou and Dar es Salaam on a tight seasonal calendar, since the West African crop arrives in the first half of the year and processors want it before it deteriorates. Kernels ship year-round and are far less time-sensitive.

The single points of failure are concentration in processing and quality on arrival. Much of world shelling capacity sits in one country, working on imported nuts bought on credit, so wet nuts or tight lending transmit straight back to farm gate prices across West Africa.