THE BUSINESS SIDE OF CASHEW.

THE BUSINESS SIDE OF CASHEW.The MozaCajú project teaches cashew farmers in northern Mozambique improved commercialization techniques to boost profits from their harvest. Cashew farmers in Mozambique like Alda Filomena André work hard all year to secure a good harvest from their cashew trees. She and her husband have a farm of several hundred trees in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where a significant portion of the cashew production in the country occurs. In Mozambique, January and February is the time for farmers like Alda to plant new cashew seedlings. In March they are pruning and cleaning their trees. In June and July, they treat the trees for protection from pests and disease. In September they clean them again in preparation for the harvest. Finally, by late October the harvest season starts, lasting through December. After the harvest comes perhaps the most important stage – commercialization. Commercialization is the process of making a harvest available on the market, from the initial collection, storage and aggregation all the way through the final sale of the product. For cashew farmers like Alda, it is the time when they can finally reap the benefits from cultivating cashew. They may work hard all the way up to harvesting the cashew from the trees, but if they do not succeed at commercialization then they will not earn a good profit. Traditionally, cashew farmers in northern Mozambique harvest and sell their cashew nuts all at once. Most commonly, a buyer – some local trader perhaps working alone or on behalf of a factory or warehouse – will come to a cashew producing community with a large scale and will buy as much raw cashew nut as the farmers are willing and able to sell at that time, without much negotiation. Since 2014, MozaCajú, a three-year project funded by USDA and implemented by TechnoServe that connects Mozambican smallholder cashew farmers to markets and factories, has been training cashew farmers in the three northern provinces of Cabo Delgado, Nampula and Zambézia on commercialization techniques in order to fill the gap in knowledge and information that has prevented them from maximizing their profits. These trainings are organized into sessions on My Cashew Business (O Meu Negocio de Caju), which covers all aspects of commercialization. The training is given first to promoters, farmers who are known and trusted in their communities and are selected according to specific criteria. These promoters then disseminate the knowledge and information to other cashew farmers in their community, who are formed into groups of 20 to 30 farmers each. A drawing from the MozaCajú Field Manual encourages farmers to sell their cashew in groups in order to negotiate prices. more