<p></p><p>The National Cashew Association of Nigeria (NCAN) has been in existence for over 10 years. It is the umbrella body for the Nigerian cashew industry. The membership is open to producers, that is farmers, traders, exporters, processors and all service providers along the value chain.About four months ago, a new executive council of NCAN was elected into office.The past executives had been working and I give kudos to them but in the last four months there has been so much awareness being created on the cashew sub-sector. One is the need to get improved packaging. When a product is well packaged, it attracts more attention, more people would want to buy and consume it.</p> <p>The focus is to increase local and international consumption of the Nigerian cashew. As consumption of the Nigerian cashew increases massively, that means more business for cashew processors, more jobs would be created and our economy would be stimulated.The market for raw cashew is just N23 billion annually. If we do more work on value addition, we would be able to grow the market to about N1 trillion annually.Currently, one tonne of processed cashew nut sells for N1.5 million locally, far much more than raw ones. It would be really beneficial to do more processing locally. Whenever we export raw cashews we are actually exporting our jobs because the jobs go with the raw cashew export. But when we process, we create jobs, so we should encourage more local processing. </p><p>If we can sell 30,000 metric tonnes of processed cashew at N1.5 million, that comes to about N45 billion for just that alone. The cashew sub-sector currently engages over 300,000 families. That translates to about 900,000, almost a million individuals depending on cashew for their livelihood. We plan to step up cashew production from 120,000 metric tonnes to 400,000 metric tonnes so that more people can become players in the sector. </p><p>Our membership is currently about 1,000 registered dues paying members. NCAN is very strong in the area of advocacy. Our aim is to ensure that the businesses of our members improve so that they can support us in promoting their interest. We aim to promote the Nigerian cashew industry, encourage investment into the sector, regulate the industry for the benefit of all the stakeholders namely farmers, traders, exporters, processors and all the service providers, encourage increased local and international consumption of cashew by increasing value addition and increase planting of cashew trees across Nigeria<br></p><p></p>