A cashew farmer in Guinea-Bissau gets a government reference price of 410 CFA francs per kilo. Across the border in Senegal, one farmers’ representative says the same kilo can fetch 700 CFA francs.
That price gap sits at the heart of cashew smuggling along the frontier between the two countries.
The government in Bissau knows it. On 10 March, its transitional Council of Ministers held the producer price at 410 CFA francs a kilo, the same as in 2025. It also named the 2026 campaign “zero tolerance for cashew smuggling”.
The next day, at the campaign launch in Bissau’s Brá industrial zone, Foreign Minister João Bernardo Vieira put a figure on the loss. On the government’s own estimate, he said, cashew smuggling costs the country about $50 million a year, roughly 30 billion CFA francs.
“Cashew is the country’s main product and should be protected, not trivialised,” he told the ceremony.
The stakes are national. Commerce Minister Jaimantino Có says more than 60 per cent of Guineans depend on the crop, directly or indirectly. Economy Minister Mamadú Mudjetaba Djaló calls it the Treasury’s main source of tax revenue, money meant for schools, hospitals and roads. Every sack lost is tax the state never sees.
On 1 June, exports began under new rules. Có said weighbridges would now match what each exporter declares against what it bought. He said about 40,000 tonnes went without proper registration in 2025.
Scales only catch cashew that reaches them. Cashew smuggling runs on paths that never see one.
Nô Pintcha, a Bissau daily, reported in May that São Domingos, in the north, sees the largest flow of cashew smuggling into Senegal. Producers slip across at night on clandestine tracks, heading for Ziguinchor, the paper found.
Local officials say they lack the means to stop it. Malam Mané, the sector’s administrative secretary, said young volunteers now help watch the tracks. Anyone caught, he warned, faces confiscation of the nuts.
Farmers hear the word differently. Fernando da Costa, who speaks for the national farmers’ association in Cacheu region, objects to the term cashew smuggling. Growers, he says, “do not steal, they produce”.
He told the paper a kilo fetches 700 CFA francs in Senegal, against 410 to 500 at home. He would rather see a tax on cross-border sales than a ban.
The gap has narrowed, not closed. Traders in São Domingos were paying 500 to 550 CFA francs in May, above the reference price, according to the same report. Yet the harvest is thin.
Morna Mutcha, a grower and trader, said volumes had not reached half of last year’s. Growers already owed traders money before the season opened, he added.
For a grower in debt, a gap of 150 CFA francs or more a kilo is hard to ignore. Nothing in the weighbridge system touches that arithmetic.
The view from Ziguinchor is wider than cashew smuggling. Senegal’s customs chief, Babacar Mbaye, finished a tour of the southern region on 6 June. Le Soleil reported that Ziguinchor customs had seized more than 10 tonnes of cannabis since January. That is already above the 5.168 tonnes taken by all southern units in the whole of 2025.
Cannabis often moves the opposite way to cashew. Police said a courier was arrested near Sédhiou on 21 February with part of a 56-kilogram convoy bound for Guinea-Bissau. His accomplice fled, leaving a loaded bicycle. The courier said he was due 60,000 CFA francs.
On cashew itself, customs’ message in Ziguinchor was about speed. Operators asked for lighter checks on the road to Dakar port and faster embarkation. Mbaye said customs were studying “specific procedures” for the sector.
Exporters there said in June that part of the cashew shipped through the port comes from Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia. So one side of the border is tightening while the other talks of fast lanes. The two policies aim at different things, yet they meet at the same frontier.
Both governments are also turning to soldiers. Military commands from the two countries met at Military Zone 5 headquarters in Ziguinchor from 10 to 13 August to prepare joint border patrols. They planned how patrols would run and how information would flow between units. The public readout of the talks makes no mention of cashew smuggling.
Bissau can police the route. It cannot easily police the price. That is the gap in its campaign.
A weighbridge can count what reaches a port. It cannot count what leaves at night, one sack at a time, towards a better price. Until growers on both sides are paid the same for a kilo, cashew smuggling will keep finding a path.
