The 4th edition of the International Cashew Processing Equipment and Technology Exhibition (SIETTA) kicked off in Abidjan on Thursday April 6, 2023.
This exhibition, which ends on April 8th, was inaugurated by Cote d’Ivoire’s Minister of State, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Adjoumani Kouassi, in the presence of the President of the International Cashew Advisory Council (CICC), Gabriel Mbairobé, and stakeholders in the sector.
SIETTA is back after its interruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme of this year’s edition is “Contribution of the cashew industry to the resilience of African countries in the face of global economic challenges,” and it aims to increase value addition.
“We are still in the upstream stages of our agricultural products in terms of their production or primary processing and still too little in terms of their secondary processing, export and marketing of finished products,” the minister said.
In the case of cashew nuts, “we can see that West Africa concentrates 45 percent of the global production of cashew nuts, half of which is produced in Cote d’Ivoire,” which recorded 1.02 million tonnes in 2022, said Mr. Kouassi, who represented the Ivorian Prime Minister Patrick Achi at the event.
India, Vietnam and Cambodia account for 45 percent of the global agricultural cashew production, 90 percent of which is processed locally. The challenge for the African continent is processing to create more value.
“What Southeast Asia is doing today is what we need to do from now on. Let’s transform our African natural wealth here in Africa, here in Cote d’Ivoire, and export finished products while ensuring their marketing,” he said.
According to Kouassi, “by processing our cashew nuts locally, we are encouraging the emergence of a national and continental agroindustry. And this means an increase in the added value of the agricultural sectors.”
“This will also guarantee a fairer remuneration for producers and all actors in the value chain,” he added.
“It is this paradigm shift that we are making today with the policy of structural transformation of our agriculture, as requested by the Head of State (Alassane Ouattara). It is this paradigm shift that allows us to strengthen SIETTA,” he noted.
For him, the local processing of cashew nuts has inestimable potential, in terms of economic wealth and employment, but also in terms of infrastructure, with the construction of processing plants or the training of young people through the development of new, more technical jobs in the sector.
During the first edition of SIETTA in 2014, Cote d’Ivoire was only at 6 percent of its production processing rate, which was 560,000 tonnes of raw cashew nuts. In 2022, the country reached a processing rate of almost 22 percent for a production of raw nuts of more than one million tonnes.
In terms of processing, Cote d’Ivoire processed just over 224,000 tonnes of raw cashew nuts, almost eight times more than in 2014, and created more than 15,000 direct jobs, 70 percent of which were held by women.
With this performance, Cote d’Ivoire has risen to third place in the world ranking of cashew nut processing and supplying countries, after Vietnam and India. Cote d’Ivoire has set itself the target of processing 50 percent of its national cashew production by 2030.
“In this dynamic, the CICC can and must be a model of collective organisation, allowing studies and debates to provide solutions for better production and processing” of cashew nuts.
CICC President Gabriel Mbairobé praised “the enormous and important efforts made by the technical and financial partners involved in the cashew sector at national, regional and international levels” and their commitment to promoting cashew in Africa.
CICC has 11 member countries that account for 80 percent of the global cashew production, with Cote d’Ivoire being the world’s largest producer.
Unfortunately, these 11 countries only benefit from 20 percent of the cashew value chain.
The Director General of the Cotton and Cashew Council of Cote d’Ivoire, Dr Adama Coulibaly, said that SIETTA aims to help increase the rate of cashew processing in African countries by creating the conditions for investors to access processing equipment and technologies.
This event also aims to offer investment opportunities to economic operators by creating business relationships between actors in the value chain, and to raise public interest in the promotion of cashew nuts.
The third edition, held in 2018, brought together a dozen promoters of processing equipment. This year, for the first time, local equipment manufacturers exhibited a complete processing chain made in Cote d’Ivoire.
AP/lb/as/APA