US-bound nuts cargo leaves Tanzania via JNIA airport
What you need to know:
- In October this year, a 20-foot container carrying 7.5 metric tonnes of branded consumer packaged cashew nuts left Mtwara for the US.
Dar es Salaam. A consignment of processed cashew nuts from Tanzania to the United States of America (USA) left the country on Monday as the East African nation puts its strategies right to move away from exporting raw cashews to value-added ones.
The eight-tonne cargo of processed cashew nuts was dispatched to New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday via Julius Nyerere International Airport (JNIA) in Dar es Salaam.
In October this year, a 20-foot container carrying 7.5 metric tonnes of branded consumer packaged cashew nuts left Mtwara for the US.
The exporter is Ward Holdings Tanzania Limited (WTH), a subsidiary of Ward Holdings International, a Michigan-based global market development and investment company. Flagging off the cargo, the deputy minister for Agriculture, Mr Anthony Mavunde, said the efforts by the WTH were supportive of the government’s plan to ensure that 60 percent of Tanzania’s cashew nuts are processed locally by 2025.
Currently, the country processes less than 10 percent of its cashew nuts, with the remainder exported raw.
“If our plan succeeds, it will mean increasing new industries and creating more jobs for our youth,” he said. The US Embassy Representative, Mr Robert Adrian Raines, said the shipment represented the growing business relationship between Tanzania and the US.
“This step will boost the wellbeing of cashew nut farmers and promote their crop,” he said.
The President of WHT, Mr Godfrey Simbeye, described the occasion as a “historic moment of cashew nuts grown, harvested, and consumer-packaged in Tanzania being exported directly for the first time from farmers in Tanzania to the US marketplace.”
Mr Simbeye assured the gathering, which included business leaders, that Ward Holdings International is a reputed American market-maker which is “committed to the advancement of Tanzanian interests through industrialisation of its agriculture industry and high-value crops.”
