With cashew prices surging and armed with solid trade policy, the country is looking to boost its farmers and processors
Every few minutes a slight thump would indicate another ripe fruit hitting the ground. Bright orange and smelling sweet and faintly sour, the cashew fruits brimming off Alieu Faye’s ten hectares of trees were definitely ready for harvest.
“Cashew starts from the seed. But you don’t pluck it from the tree. You have to let the fruit fall down itself, and when you pick it up, you unpluck it from the fruit,” Faye said.
Faye, who is also President of The Gambia Cashew Farmers Association, started farming cashew in 1998, obtaining his first plants from neighboring Guinea-Bissau, where the cashew sector is – shall we say – fruiting.