Nigeria grows a great deal of cashew, yet it captures only a sliver of the crop's real value. The country is the sixth largest producer of cashew nuts in the world and exports more than 80 per cent of them raw, mostly to Vietnam and India, where they are processed into butter, snacks and cosmetic ingredients, according to The Conversation. The nut travels. The fruit it grows from is left to rot.
A Fruit Thrown Away by the Tonne
The cashew apple, the fleshy pseudofruit attached to the nut, yields a juice rich in vitamins and minerals, but it also contains anti-nutrients and has an astringent taste, so most apples are simply discarded once the nut is removed, according to The Conversation. The scale of the loss is enormous. Once the nut is taken, between 90 and 95 per cent of the total cashew fruit weight is typically thrown away because of limited processing knowledge, high equipment costs and poor postharvest handling, according to a 2025 review in SAGE journals, which noted that roughly 1.05 million tonnes of cashew apple were produced in 2023 and largely wasted.
Waste That Could Be Wealth
The apple is not garbage, it is unprocessed raw material. Cashew apple juice can be converted through biotechnology into citric acid, drinks and ethanol, while the shell and pulp can be turned into animal feed and bioethanol and the shell liquid into inputs for paints, varnishes, agrochemicals and medicines, according to The Conversation. Producing citric acid locally from the juice would add value to cashew farming, cut the environmental nuisance of dumping the apples and save the foreign exchange Nigeria spends importing the acid, the same analysis argued, a case echoed in Nigerian coverage by Blueprint and allAfrica.
Exporting Raw, Importing Value
The pattern is familiar across Nigerian agriculture. Raw commodities leave cheap and finished goods come back dear, and cashew shows both halves of that trade at once, with unprocessed nuts sailing to Asia while the apple that could seed a domestic juice, feed and industrial-chemical business is left in the field. Building even modest processing capacity near cashew farms would let growers earn from the whole fruit rather than just the seed.
The discarded cashew apple is a picture of value lost for want of processing. FoodPrices Nigeria tracks verified retail prices across Lagos markets and follows the crops whose wasted potential quietly weighs on farm incomes and the wider food economy.
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