Ghana wants more for its cashews, but it's a tough nut to crack

Source: BBC

The Accra street vendor looks at me, bemused.

I'm trying to establish how the rather flimsy 30g bag of roasted cashew nuts she's selling, beside a sweltering highway in Ghana's capital, costs me the equivalent of about 75 cents (60p).

That's obviously not a lot of money for me, a visitor from the UK, but I'm amazed at the mark up. The price is at least 4,000% higher than the cost of buying the same weight of raw, unshelled cashews from a Ghanian farmer.

"It's incredible," I protest. Yet she doesn't understand my English, or my reasoning.

The price of the nuts was, after all, printed on the packet. And explaining why I thought it was beyond the pale was never going to be easy.

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