Agriculture Business Week

Most people, when they talk about cashew, refer only to the nuts. Perhaps this is due to the growing popularity of cashew nuts as snack food and an ingredient in baked products, so it is considered as the most important product from cashew.

Palawan is considered the cashew capital of the Philippines, supplying 90 percent of the country’s nut requirement. In Roxas, for instance, there are 1,161,576 fruit-bearing trees producing an average of 13,938 metric tons of nuts.

Due to the abundance of this fruit, cashew is the major One-Town, One-Product (OTOP) of Palawan. OTOP is 1 priority program of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs by promoting a specific product or service with competitive advantage in each city and municipality. And for this program, Palawan has planted 24,300 hectares to cashew in 2004.

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The introduction of a BPRE manually operated cashew nut sheller in Brgy. Duale, Limay, Bataan has increased the price of cashew nuts from P80 to P600 per pail and, hence, the income of cashew growers.

This was learned recently from Mrs. Rosario “Nanay Chayong” Villaviray, who operates a small-scale cashew processing business, which uses the BPRE cashew nut sheller. The plant produces processed and semi-processed cashew kernels. Operations in cashew nut processing include shelling, picking the cashew kernels from the shelled nut, removal of the testa, oven cooking, and packaging.

With the BPRE cashew nut sheller, the cashew nuts are shelled to produce whole nuts. For two years, BPRE specialists taught Nanay Chayong and her workers how to process and market cashew products.

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