The cashew rules are the easy part

By Zitamar News • 5 Aug 2026

More than three years after parliament passed a new cashew law, the government has finally approved the regulation needed to enforce it. The government says the rules cover the whole chain, from planting and drying to processing, import and export, and will make the sector more competitive. Passing rules is the easy part. The harder question, which the announcement steps around, is whether the state can make anyone follow them.

Start with the export surtax on raw nuts, currently 18%, which the government has proposed raising to 22%. Whether it is 18% or 22% barely matters, because much of it is never collected. Industry figures tell Zitamar that exporters routinely avoid the levy by paying officials along the chain, or by under-declaring the value and quantity of what leaves the country. A rate that is negotiable at the port is not really a rate at all.

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That is where the damage is done, and it is not mainly at the Tanzanian border. Last season, the authorities put the raw nuts smuggled overland from Cabo Delgado into Tanzania at 7,600 tonnes, costing the state more than MZN114m ($1.8m) in unpaid duty. That is the piece we can count. The larger leak, industry sources say, runs through the port of Nacala, in the under-invoicing of the main export flow to India, Vietnam and increasingly China. Nuts declared at a fraction of their value, or passed off as shells, let the exporter dodge the surtax and keep hard currency abroad. There is no public figure for what this costs, which is part of the problem.

That distortion is what starves Mozambique’s factories. An exporter moving under-invoiced nuts and laundered dollars can outbid a legitimate processor for the farmer’s crop, because the point of the deal is not the cashew but the clean money and the foreign exchange that come out of it. For the farmer, the higher price is welcome and rational. For a factory that pays tax, wages and electricity, it is a contest it cannot win. The result is in the numbers: in the first quarter of this year, raw cashew exports earned $68.4m, while the processed kernel, the part that carries the jobs, earned $2.9m.

None of this is fixed by taxing farmers harder or forcing them to sell cheaply to the factories. That was tried before, and it mainly punished the poor. The distortion to remove is the illegal one. Take away the premium that comes from evasion and laundering, and a domestic processor can compete for nuts without anyone having to legislate a lower price at the farm gate.

The government says 195,400 tonnes were marketed in the 2024/25 campaign, near historic highs, and wants to lift production to 689,000 tonnes by 2034. People in the industry put actual output far lower, nearer 90,000 to 110,000 tonnes. Some of the gap may be double-counting rather than fraud, but it is too wide to wave away. Processing targets and investment plans are only as sound as the crop figures beneath them, and those figures are not sound.

So the regulation should be judged against a short and unglamorous list: purchases that can be traced, customs declarations matched electronically to the cargo that actually leaves, production statistics that survive contact with the people who buy the crop, and penalties applied to everyone rather than waived for those who pay. Only this week, customs detained a tanker at Nacala over fuel allegedly declared to dodge duty. A different commodity, the same port and the same trick. Until the new cashew rules meet that test, Mozambique’s problem will not be the absence of a law. It will be a law that stops at the customs gate.