Cashew trees season in the North and other parts

In March and April in the north, farmers smell a sharp and faintly acid scent coming from the ground where all the cashews have rotted because nobody picks them up. What people are really going for is the nut, so the pulp, which is the edible part is just left to rot. It took me a while to notice how much of that stuff was rotting on the ground.

The trees here are shorter with big branches that spread out, they are not the tall trees that grow in the southern part of the country where cocoa comes from. When you are walking between the trees, you won’t get any shade from them.

The ground in some parts is very poor, almost like sand, but these trees grow no matter where they are grown, which is the main reason why farmers in places where it rarely rains have been clearing land in order to plant cashew trees.

Very little of the money that comes back from the harvest of cashew nuts actually reflects what the nuts are worth by the time they get into the processing facility in Vietnam or India. Farmers sell the seeds, buyers get them all together and by the time that money comes back into the community, it has already been moved out of the community. Most of the people involved in the trade knows this. They have known this for years yet farmers are still planting more land with cashews than with other crops that will have a much poorer chance of producing anything, that's why it is still very profitable for farmers to continue to plant cashews.

People notice the difference between what the land can produce and what those crops earn once they are harvested and as they live with that difference, they begin to see that as a failing of the system.

But when you start looking at it that way, you will see that it is a lot more than a system, it is just how the system is set up to work and that is, the producers will continue to make money, but the consumers will not.

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