The Vice President of Tanzania, Dr. Philip Mpango opened the International Cashew Conference 2023 today on October 11, 2023 at the Julius Nyerere International Conference Hall (JNICC), in the city of Dar es Salaam.
The meeting was attended by more than 600 stakeholders from various countries around the world where the motto of the meeting is Invest in Cashews for Sustainable Development.
In his opening speech, Dr. Mpango said that cashew has a great contribution to the economy due to its opportunities in the international market where last year (2022), it was estimated to be 7 billion US dollars.
He said that the sales of the product are expected to grow and reach 10.5 billion US dollars by 2030.
Thus, the Vice President has asked cashew stakeholders participating in the International Conference to discuss and prepare strategies that will enable their countries, including Tanzania, to benefit from the crop.
He has encouraged the participants of the Conference to discuss methods to increase the value of the crop in order to remove the obstacles of various oppressive charges, to share the experience of technologies that will help to increase production and facilitate access to statistics of the crop.
The Vice President has said that under the Government’s Strategy to bring changes to the Agricultural Sector of Agenda 10/30 which provides guidance for increasing the growth of the agricultural sector from the current 5 percent to 10 percent by the year 2023, the cashew crop is among the crops of strategically targeted to contribute to that growth.
He said, for ten years now, the cashew crop has been growing at an average of 220,000 tons since 2013/2014 and the Government’s goal is to reach 1000,000 tons by 2030.
He explained the mission by showing that the goals for the year 2023/2024 are to reach 400,000 tons and also for the year 2026/2027 to reach 700,000 tons.
