For three decades the cashew trade ran on a simple division of labour. West Africa grew the nut. Asia shelled it. The kernel then travelled a second time, to Europe or North America, before it reached a shelf. Guinea-Bissau sat at the origin end of that chain, exporting close to nine-tenths of its harvest raw.

That arrangement is loosening. Freight costs on the Asia legs have not returned to their pre-2020 base. Tariff schedules have diverged in ways that reward kernels shipped directly from origin. And duty-free access into the European Union under Everything But Arms arrangements applies to the processed kernel, not only the raw nut.

The result is that a tonne shelled in Bissau now competes on landed cost with a tonne shelled six thousand miles away, before any account is taken of the shorter chain, the reduced handling or the traceability that buyers increasingly ask for in writing.

None of this makes processing easy. Kernel outturn discipline, moisture control and grading consistency are operational problems that reward experience and punish improvisation. But the commercial case no longer depends on sentiment about local value-add. It depends on arithmetic, and the arithmetic has moved.