According to the General Department of Customs, in the first quarter, the export of cashew nuts was estimated at 122,000 tons, worth 708 million USD, up 16.6% in volume and 14.2% in value over the same period in 2022. The average export value was 5,826 USD/ton, down 2.1%. According to the Vietnam Cashew Association, besides the domestic supply, the cashew industry is still quite dependent on the import of raw cashew materials for processing. In the first 2 months of this year, our country imported 272,000 tons of raw cashew nuts, worth more than 360 million USD; up 78.2% in volume and 52.2% in value over the same period in 2022. Previously, Africa completely sold raw cashew nuts to Vietnam. Now, they import machinery from Vietnam to process cashews. But because the production is still young, the country has only just separated the outer shell and the preprocessed kernels they will sell back to Vietnam. The Association said that the story worth mentioning here is that importing raw materials to Vietnam for processing will be very good, but importing semi-finished products will cause many immediate and long-term consequences for the industry. Accordingly, the industry will lose jobs for workers, continuing to import semi-finished materials will create opportunities for businesses in Africa to improve their production levels and technical quality. From there, this country will compete directly with the world market for buying cashew kernels from Vietnam. In addition, we also do not know if the quality is guaranteed, leading to the consequences that customers importing cashew kernels will evaluate the quality of Vietnamese businesses as not guaranteed, the cashew kernel trading market will be shrinking. clusters, losing market share. In addition to Africa, Vietnam is also importing preliminarily processed cashews from Cambodia, the industry's worries will increase in the coming time. Therefore, many processing factories want the Vietnam Cashew Association to propose the Vietnam Trade and Industry Federation to recommend the Government to have an intervention policy in importing preliminarily processed cashews to protect the domestic cashew industry. reduce competitive pressure for businesses.