Agriculture and Environment: Cashews

Better Management Practices

Cashew trees are one of the few crops that generally have a more positive than negative environmental impact associated with their cultivation.

This is because they tend not to be cultivated in plantations that require clearing large areas of land.

Sizeable plantations in Brazil
The notable exception is in Brazil where some cooperatives, with government assistance, have planted thousands of hectares of the trees. Rather, cashews are most often planted in clumps and as border vegetation. Increasingly, they are volunteers that are self-seeded and tolerated by landowners.

Good food source for wildlife
Cashews support and protect wildlife with their shade, their fruits, and their vertical and horizontal architecture. Even in large plantations, cashews are still a major food source for wildlife.

Effective at halting soil erosion
Cashew trees are very effective at retaining soil and stopping erosion, especially in coastal areas. This was why the Portuguese introduced cashew trees in many coastal areas of the tropical world that remain among the most important producers today.

Along the coast of Orissa in India, cashew trees are still planted as shelterbelts and windbreaks. They stabilise sand dunes and protect the adjacent fertile agricultural land from drifting sand. More recently, cashews have proven useful as a species of choice for reforestation in degraded areas.

They are one of the few trees that do well under such conditions and that generate both food and income for producers so that their survival is ensured.

Ways to improve profitability & efficiency
In general, however, there are a number of important, practical ways that cashew producers, and the industry as a whole, could be made more efficient and profitable.

These include:

• Increasing yields by pruning, replanting, or "topping" existing trees with new grafts in order to increase production and control pests.
• Bringing more areas into cashew cultivation, especially areas that are marginal, abandoned, or degraded.
• Undertaking value-added hand processing at the farm or community level so that more of the value of the finished product accrues to the producer or the community.
• Processing the cashew apple into juice, dried fruit, wine, liquor, and other products. The fruit could provide an excellent source of vitamins and minerals for many households that are short on both. Income from the sale of juice could also be significant given the large amount of fruit that is currently abandoned.
• Increasing the ability of local producers and shellers to sort their nuts by standard grades so they are not penalised by buyers who, in turn, capture the value (often as much as 10 -15%) of sorting the nuts by grades.
• Improving local storage capacity and conditions so that cashews can be stored until hand shellers have a chance to process the entire crop. This would also allow the production to be sold onto the world market more gradually so that dumping would affect prices less.
• Increasing transparency and competition among buyers to improve producer prices.