What a Kilo of Cashew Buys
More than nine tenths of everything Guinea-Bissau sells abroad is a nut almost nobody in the country eats, and a large share of it is not sold for money at all — it is swapped for imported rice at a rate the government announces each spring. The rice used to be grown here, in fields hacked out of the mangrove by hand.
On the roadside between Mansoa and Bafatá in May there are sacks. Not stalls, not a market — jute sacks of raw cashew stacked at the edge of the tarmac outside compounds, waiting for a buyer with a lorry. Some of them will be paid for in CFA franc notes. A great many will be paid for in rice: a sack of imported broken rice handed over for an agreed weight of nuts, no cash involved, the transaction settled in the yard.
This is not an informal survival of something older. It is the mechanism by which a country feeds itself. Cashew accounts for more than 90 per cent of Guinea-Bissau's export earnings and around a tenth of government tax revenue, and rice is the staple that almost every household eats twice a day and that the country no longer grows enough of. The terms of the swap between the two are the most consequential number in Bissau, and it is set by decree.
The price is announced in March
Every year, before the harvest, the government fixes a reference price — a floor, in CFA francs per kilogram, that buyers are supposed to pay farmers at the farm gate. For the 2025 campaign it was raised by around 17 per cent to 410 francs, roughly 63 euro cents a kilo, among the highest farm-gate floors in West Africa. The 2026 campaign was opened in March by the transitional government installed after the coup of November 2025, which tells you how far down the list of things a new administration can postpone this one sits.
A floor price is a strange instrument for a crop sold into a world market the seller does not influence. Guinea-Bissau is a significant producer of raw cashew but not the price-setter; India and Vietnam, which buy the overwhelming majority of the crop, are shelling nuts from Côte d'Ivoire and Benin and Cambodia in the same weeks. When the international price comes in above the floor, the floor is irrelevant and everyone is happy. When it comes in below, buyers simply do not buy at the legal price, the campaign stalls, and nuts sit in yards through the wet season and lose value. This has happened repeatedly. The floor protects the farmer only in the years the farmer did not need protecting.
What was there before the trees
The rice being handed over for those sacks arrives at the port of Bissau from Asia. It did not always. The coastal plain of this country carries one of the more remarkable pieces of agricultural engineering in West Africa: the bolanha, a rice field cut out of tidal mangrove. Building one means throwing up an earth dyke to shut the sea out of a stretch of swamp, then flushing the salt out of the soil over successive rainy seasons until it will take rice, then maintaining the dyke and its wooden sluice gates against every tide for as long as the field is to exist. The Balanta, who did most of it, developed the technique to a level that colonial agronomists recorded with something close to bafflement, and the fields fed a population without imports.
After independence — declared unilaterally in September 1973 and recognised by Lisbon a year later, after the Carnation Revolution — rice self-sufficiency was a declared national objective and stayed one for years. The state did not get there. What it did do — along with the World Bank programmes of the 1980s and a liberalised export trade — was make planting cashew the single most rational thing a rural household could do, and the trees went in on the plateau above the swamps in enormous numbers.
A cashew tree asks for a few days of labour a year and pays in cash. A mangrove rice field asks for collective work every single season and pays in food. Guinea-Bissau did not choose between them in a meeting. It chose one household at a time.
Why the dykes broke
The failure mode of a bolanha is fast and close to irreversible. The dyke is earth; the tide is relentless. Maintenance is not a job for a family but for a work group, organised by age grade, turning out every year — and it is heavy, wet, unglamorous work done at exactly the season when a young man could instead be earning cash from nuts, or be in Bissau, or be in Portugal. Skip the repair for a season or two and the sea comes back in. Once salt water is over the field, the years of flushing that made it fertile have to be done again from the beginning, and mostly they are not. Rising sea levels and a less dependable rainy season push the same way, but the first cause is arithmetic about labour.
The result is visible from any road on the coast: banks of dead trees and white salt flats where fields were, and behind them mangrove creeping back into ground that had been walled off from it for generations. Some of that is now being counted as ecological restoration, and as mangrove it genuinely is. As food it is a subtraction.
The levy that was supposed to fix it
Almost the entire crop leaves the country raw, in sacks, to be shelled somewhere else — and shelling is where the money in cashew is made. Only a small fraction is processed in Guinea-Bissau, in a handful of small plants that have opened, closed and reopened over the years. Successive governments have understood this perfectly well, and in May 2011 one of them created FUNPI, a fund for the industrialisation of agricultural products, financed by a parafiscal levy on every kilo of raw cashew exported. The idea was orthodox and defensible: tax the raw export, use the money to build the factories, stop selling the cheapest version of your only product.
It became one of the most bitterly contested policies in the country. Exporters passed the levy back down to farmers, which meant the fund was in practice financed by the poorest people in the chain; the factories it was meant to build largely did not appear; and the arrangement acquired a reputation for opacity that it never shook off. Farmers and their organisations treated FUNPI as a deduction with nothing at the end of it, and said so loudly. The underlying diagnosis was right and the instrument discredited itself, which is a worse outcome than doing nothing, because it makes the next attempt harder to argue for.
The argument now
Nobody in Bissau thinks the present arrangement is good. The disagreement is about which end to pull. One side wants processing: kernels instead of nuts, a domestic industry, more of the value kept. The other points out that processing capacity is expensive, that Asian shellers are efficient and entrenched, and that a country with unreliable power and a port that cannot take large ships is starting a long way behind. A third argument, quieter and probably the most important, is simply that the rice ought to come back — that a country with this coastline importing its staple is a policy failure rather than a fact of nature, and that rehabilitating dykes is cheaper per calorie than anything else on the table.
What none of them can do much about is the timing. The nuts come off the trees in April and May, the price is announced before that, and the household in the yard with the sacks has to decide within a few weeks whether to hold out for cash or take the rice. It is the same decision every year, made by hundreds of thousands of people, and it has quietly determined what this country grows, what it eats and what it sells for half a century.