Excerpt from global cashew conference held in Nigeria
The event with theme: FINANCING NIGERIA’S CASHEWINDUSTRY , held at sheba centre, Lagos, had in
attendance, cashew industry stakeholders from across
the country.
In his opening remark Mr Anga said: As Chairman of the
Local organizing committee for the NEXIM & NCAN
CASHEW FINANCE FORUM, my welcome address will be
a little different from what is normal. This is because we
are talking about the WINNER CROP and the best fruit to
eat in order to promote our health, life and economy.
When we build our cashew industry, we engage our
women, our men and most importantly our youths.
NEXIM Bank is here to meet a very important need of
the cashew industry, let us take advantage of this
window of opportunity and build our cashew businesses.
He went further to say that Nigeria’s annual production
of cashew is two million metric tonnes consisting of the
raw cashew nuts and cashew apple. Raw cashew nuts
represents 120,000 tons valued at 24 Billion Naira while
cashew apple is 1,080,000 tons of which over 80% of
cashew apple produced annually in Nigeria is lost to
waste. We cannot afford to watch this trend continue.
Cashew apple contains 6 to 10 times more Vitamin C
than any citrus including orange. Cashew apple is lovely,
juicy, fibrous, sweet, has a unique acidic taste and is an
excellent source of Vitamin C. as a way forward, we need
to convert this huge waste to wealth by establishing
cashew juice processing centres across the cashew belt.
It is important to note that the first 4 letters of the word
cashew is cash . I am therefore convinced that the time
to unlock the cash in cashew is now!