Guinea-Bissau requests help from Vietnam to sell cashews

The government of Guinea-Bissau plans to send a delegation to Vietnam to discuss with the country’s central bank ways to make funds available to fund Vietnamese companies to buy part of Guinea-Bissau’s unsold cashew production, the Guinean Minister of Commerce and Handicrafts said last week in Bissau.

Minister Vicente Fernandes said he had secured the agreement of the Vietnamese authorities to help Guinea-Bissau companies to buy cashew nuts in order to save the marketing campaign of the product and added he was in touch with Hanoi to make the operation feasible as soon as possible.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 tons of cashew nuts are still in the hands of Guinean farmers, given the “turbulence” seen this year in the sale of cashew nuts, due to the lack of coordination of the national authorities in fixing the base price for the product.

In addition, unlike in previous years, Indian companies did not buy cashew nuts this year from the Guinea-Bissau producers, as the Indian government cancelled the subsidy it granted on the product.

Two months after the end of the marketing year, Guinea-Bissau has only exported about 50,000 tons of cashew nuts, with the authorities previously projecting that 150,000 tons would be exported.  MDT/Macauhub