After the Guinea-Bissau cashew harvest: what the 2026 crop does next

The Guinea-Bissau cashew harvest runs broadly from April into June, and by the time September arrives the buying season is behind us and the raw stock is in the warehouse. This is the point in the year at which a processor stops talking about the crop and starts measuring it, because what happens at origin between intake and shelling quietly determines how the rest of the season goes.

The first measure is volume, but volume on its own tells a buyer very little. The second, and the one that matters, is outturn. Kernel outturn ratio, usually written as KOR, is the weight of saleable kernel recovered from a given weight of raw nut, expressed in pounds per 80-kilogram bag in the West African convention. Two crops of identical tonnage can produce materially different quantities of kernel, and it is the outturn, not the headline harvest figure, that fixes a processor's raw cost per kilogram of finished product.

The third measure is condition at intake. Nuts arrive from cooperatives, aggregators and direct buying channels across the country, and each intake is weighed, sampled and recorded against a lot code before it enters store. Moisture at intake is checked because it governs both storage behaviour and shelling performance; stock that goes into the warehouse too wet is a mould and quality problem deferred, not avoided. Sampling at this stage also gives an early read on nut count and kernel recovery, which is how a realistic production plan is built rather than an optimistic one.

Storage discipline through the post-harvest months is unglamorous work and is where much of the quality of the finished kernel is actually protected. Stock is held off the ground, ventilated, monitored for moisture movement, and drawn for shelling in rotation rather than at convenience. The nut is stable when it is kept dry; it is the lapses in ordinary warehouse practice, not the crop itself, that produce most avoidable losses at origin.

For buyers, the useful question to put to an origin supplier in September is not how large the national harvest was, since that number is an estimate and often a generous one. The useful questions are what outturn the supplier is seeing at intake, how stock is being held, and what the crop profile implies for grade mix over the coming season. A crop that shells towards a higher share of wholes supports wholes programmes; one that trends smaller will favour splits and pieces, and a supplier who knows their intake can plan that with you rather than discover it with you.

We do not publish crop figures here, because any figure we are not prepared to stand behind in a contract discussion is decoration. What we can say plainly is that the 2026 intake is recorded lot by lot, and buyers planning fourth-quarter shipments or 2027 contract volume are welcome to raise the conversation now, while the season's stock position is at its clearest.