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Cashews and Co-ops Help Farmers Earn More
FrontLines - November 2009
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Workers clean and sort cashew nuts at the Condor Cashew Factory, which receives USAID support.
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Lydia Ernesto
Tembe (right), 45,
a volunteer health
worker, tests a
woman for malaria.
For nine years,
Tembe, trained
by USAID, has
provided villagers
with such tests as
well as condoms
and medicine for
malaria, diarrhea,
worms, pneumonia,
and other illnesses.
She is one of 6,500
community health
workers trained
through U.S. aid
programs.
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NAMPULA, Mozambique—
The cashew trees turning northern
Mozambique’s landscape
green are also producing tons of
valuable nuts for export as
USAID helps the country try to
regain its place as the world’s
leading exporter of cashews.
At Condor—the largest
cashew processing factory in
Mozambique—600 men and
women fill the factory floors with
their chatter and their hard work,
steaming the nuts, removing their
outer shells, cleaning patiently
all clinging skins, sorting them,
and then sealing them in plastic
bags with carbon dioxide to kill
all unwanted organisms before
shipment.
“We are paying back USAID”
for the loan it gave to start the
factory, said manager Americo
Matos, 28, who moved here from
Portugal to run the operation.
USAID also supports planting
improved varieties of cashew
trees. In 2006, the Cooperative
League of the USA (CLUSA),
which has been working with
USAID support for 15 years in
Mozambique, helped to plant
5,000 cashew trees, which are
expected to produce triple the
yield per tree when the plants
fully mature in five to seven
years.
With some 80 percent of the
people of Mozambique living
in the countryside—mainly off
small scale farming—aid projects
that can help them grow
and sell their produce are bound
to reduce the poverty that still
stifles development.
USAID is trying a new
approach here—getting small
farmers with one or two hectares
of land to become “emerging”
farmers who increase their
farm size to 20 hectares or
more. Stephen Gudz, who heads
the CLUSA team in northern
Mozambique, said that when
farmers expand cultivation
they can buy seed and fertilizer
at discounts, buy or rent
farm equipment, and sell large
volumes of produce that attract
buyers and give the farmer clout
in the market place.
Aside from cashews, USAID
assistance goes to produce
sesame for export to the Middle
East; soybeans to serve as feed
for the burgeoning chicken
industry; and sweet potatoes for
local consumption.
U.S. assistance also helped
20,000 farmers form a producer
cooperative called IKURU,
which cleans and sells sesame,
ground nuts, and corn.
American farmers have long
known that when they form
such cooperatives to improve
production and market their
produce, they can vastly
increase their income.
“I’d like to have enough
money to invest in equipment
that would clean and grade my
sesame seeds,” said Moises
Rapozo, the manager of the
IKURU program.
★
FrontLines is published
by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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