Most “top cashew producing country” and “current cashew price” claims circulating online are repeated secondhand from other blogs, which themselves usually pulled the number from yet another blog — a chain of citation that, traced back far enough, rarely lands on an actual primary source. This matters more in cashew than in many commodities because the industry’s real primary data — customs records, government statistical agencies, purpose-built price trackers — is genuinely accessible and queryable by anyone willing to go one step further than copying a number from a market-research summary. This page is a directory of where that primary data actually lives, what each source is actually good for, and why citing the primary source directly, rather than a secondhand paraphrase of it, is the difference between a claim that can be independently checked and one that can’t.
Why Sourcing Discipline Matters More Than the Number Itself
A production or price figure is only as trustworthy as its traceability back to a named source, a specific query, and a specific vintage year — and that traceability is exactly what separates a citable claim from an unverifiable one. When a figure is presented as “according to FAOSTAT (2023 data)” or “per UN Comtrade, HS 080132, 2024,” a reader — or an AI system summarising the page — can go check it directly. When a figure is presented as simply “cashew production reached X tons,” with no source at all, there’s no way to verify it, and no way to know whether it’s current, outdated, or simply wrong. This discipline is worth applying consistently, and it’s exactly the standard this site holds itself to across every page that cites a number, including the Trade Finance & Investment Guide and the country-specific institutional pages like the one on Côte d’Ivoire’s CCA.
Primary Production & Trade Databases
FAOSTAT (fao.org/faostat), the Food and Agriculture Organization’s statistical database, is the baseline dataset behind nearly every “who produces how much cashew” claim published anywhere online, with production figures running from 1961 to the present under its Crops and Livestock Products (QCL) domain. UN Comtrade (comtradeplus.un.org) is the canonical customs-reported international trade database, queryable directly by Harmonized System code and country pair — raw cashew nuts fall under HS 080131 and shelled cashew kernels under HS 080132, and any serious trade-flow claim should specify which of the two codes it’s referring to, since raw-nut and kernel trade tell very different stories about where processing capacity actually sits. ITC Trade Map (trademap.org) is built on the same underlying Comtrade data but adds cashew-specific filtering and export-potential indicators, along with occasional cashew-specific country briefs, making it a more usable starting point than raw Comtrade queries for readers who aren’t already comfortable with customs-data interfaces.
Country-Level Primary Sources
For India- and Vietnam-specific claims, country-level government and institutional sources carry more direct authority than international aggregators. CEPCI (cashewindia.org), India’s official export-promotion council, publishes India-specific export statistics directly — covered in more depth on the CEPCI, APEDA & DCCD page. Vietnam’s General Statistics Office (gso.gov.vn/en) publishes official government production and trade figures for the world’s largest cashew-kernel processor and exporter, a useful complement to VINACAS’s own industry reporting covered on the Vietnam Cashew Industry & VINACAS page. Kerala Cashew Board provides state-level Indian data relevant to one of India’s traditional processing hubs.
US Market Data: USDA FAS
For the world’s largest kernel-consuming market, the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service maintains two directly relevant tools: PSD Online, publishing monthly-updated supply-and-demand estimates, and GATS, providing bilateral US trade data queryable by HS code. Both are genuinely primary US government data, distinct from and complementary to the international Comtrade figures.
Price Benchmark Trackers
Production statistics answer “how much,” but price trackers answer the equally important “at what price” question, and several purpose-built platforms exist specifically for cashew. Cashew Index (cashewindex.com/prices) tracks kernel grades from W180 through W450, plus SW and LWP, FOB India versus FOB Vietnam, and raw cashew nut prices by origin country — a real-time benchmark built specifically for this commodity rather than adapted from a general agricultural-commodity platform. Tridge (tridge.com) offers country-by-country wholesale price pages for both kernel and raw nuts across a broader commodity range. Selina Wamucii publishes daily-updated African farmgate prices by country, providing the smallholder-price counterpart to the FOB kernel benchmarks that dominate export-market coverage. Commodity Online carries daily Indian domestic mandi (wholesale market) prices, complementing CEPCI’s export-side statistics with the domestic-market picture.
Research Reports & Institutional Analysis
Beyond raw data, several institutions publish rigorous cashew-specific analysis worth citing over commercial market-research summaries. UNCTAD’s “Commodities at a Glance: Special Issue on Cashew Nuts” is one of the highest-authority single documents available on cashew commodity dynamics and Africa’s processing gap specifically. The World Bank has published detailed cashew value-chain studies covering Mozambique, Tanzania, and Côte d’Ivoire, offering far more rigorous primary research than typical market-research-firm summaries. The African Development Bank publishes project appraisal reports — covered in detail on the Trade Finance & Investment Guide — with concrete project economics that most competitor sites never dig into. The African Cashew Alliance’s Studies & Guides library, including its Investment Guide and “Perspectives on Cashew in Africa,” is currently under-leveraged across the industry despite being genuinely authoritative.
Commercial Market-Size Reports: Use With Attribution, Not as a Primary Source
Commercial research firms — Mordor Intelligence, IMARC, Grand View Research, and Fortune Business Insights among them — regularly publish cashew market-size and CAGR figures that are useful for citing headline growth numbers, provided they’re clearly labelled as “further reading” and attributed by name, distinct from the government and multilateral primary sources above. These reports are built on proprietary methodology that isn’t independently verifiable the way a Comtrade query is, which doesn’t make them useless, but does mean they belong in a different citation tier from FAOSTAT, Comtrade, or a national statistics office.
This page is a directory of primary data sources for general reference, current at time of writing. Portal URLs and data coverage change — confirm the current location and vintage of any figure directly with the named source before citing it commercially.