How Côte d’Ivoire became the world’s top cashew producer

Three decades ago, cashew was a fallback crop for farmers whose cotton stopped paying. Today it’s the harvest no other country can match.

Côte d’Ivoire did not set out to dominate the global cashew trade. The crop’s rise here started almost by accident, as a refuge for farmers in the northern savanna whose traditional cash crop was failing them. Three decades later, no country on earth grows more raw cashews, and the government is now chasing a second, harder title: turning that raw dominance into an industrial one.

01
A crop born from cotton’s decline

The story starts in the savanna regions of the north, where cotton had long been the dominant cash crop. Through the 1990s, that economy came under increasing strain, and farmers began looking for something else that would still convert into cash at the end of a season. Cashew trees, already scattered across the region, fit the need: they required little upkeep, tolerated the dry savanna climate, and had a buyer waiting at the other end of the value chain in Asia. What began as a fallback crop for farmers with few other options slowly became the main source of rural income across the north.

02
The climb to number one

Once cashew took hold, the growth curve became difficult to ignore. Output climbed from a modest base in the early 2000s to around 320,000 tonnes by 2010, already five times what the country was producing a decade earlier. The momentum kept building through the following years, and by 2015 Côte d’Ivoire had overtaken every established rival, including India and Nigeria, to become the world’s largest producer of raw cashew nuts. It has not given up that position since.

03
Why Côte d’Ivoire won the raw cashew race

No single factor explains the climb. The northern savanna offered exactly the growing conditions cashew trees favor, and land that was marginal for cocoa or food crops turned out to be well suited to cashew. The 2013 governance reform gave the sector a regulator with the authority to set guaranteed floor prices each season, which gave farmers a predictable reason to keep planting even when world prices dipped. Rules restricting the internal movement of raw nuts — shipments are only permitted to travel from growing areas in the north down toward the port — made it harder to smuggle the crop across the border into Ghana or Burkina Faso, keeping more of the harvest inside the formal Ivorian market. And because cashew requires relatively little in the way of inputs or specialized labor compared with cocoa, it was an easier crop for smallholders to scale up quickly.

04
The next chapter: chasing the kernel, not just the nut

Winning the raw production race turned out to be only half the story. For years, nearly all of Côte d’Ivoire’s cashews left the country unprocessed, shipped to India and especially Vietnam, which built a specialized processing equipment industry that let it dominate the export of finished cashew kernels — the more valuable, edible product that actually reaches supermarket shelves. Domestic processing capacity in Côte d’Ivoire stood at just 68,515 tonnes in 2015. By 2024 it had grown roughly fivefold to around 350,000 tonnes, with industry estimates putting installed capacity even higher.

The three-way race: raw production and processing

Sources: FAO, CCA, Vietnam Cashew Association (VINACAS), Cashew Export Promotion Council of India. Figures are approximate and vary by source.

The government has set a target of processing half of the country’s raw cashew harvest domestically by 2030, a goal that would make Côte d’Ivoire the first African country to challenge Asian dominance in a processed agricultural export at that scale. The processing push has also reshaped the sector’s labor market: industry estimates suggest it has created well over 18,000 jobs, with roughly two-thirds of those positions held by women, and new agro-industrial zones dedicated to cashew processing are expected to add thousands more in the coming years.

05
The gap Côte d’Ivoire is still closing

Vietnam remains the benchmark. Its processors built an entire equipment ecosystem around cashew cracking and peeling, exporting affordable machinery that lowered the barrier to entry for processors everywhere, including Côte d’Ivoire’s own growing plants. India, by contrast, is losing ground: nearly 40 percent of its cashew plantations are now more than 25 years old, dragging down yields and kernel quality even as it holds on to significant processing capacity built up over decades. Côte d’Ivoire’s advantage is fresh momentum and government backing; its disadvantage is that it is still building the industrial base Vietnam has had for years.

Key takeaways