RUPUNUNI 2001 - 02

St. Ignatus Women’s Cashew Nut Project

“We started four years ago with nothing, you know, just a group of women. We looked at our children and saw that we had to do something for them; to feed them and give them school uniforms. So we started with a kitchen garden, with our own money. We couldn’t look on and do nothing. No money was coming in”. It is with these simple, yet profound words that Emileen Baretto, the Chairperson of the St. Ignatius Helping Hand Women’s Group introduced herself and her group to us. She stood proudly before us, not asking for a handout, but demanding respect.

We had initially met them on the first day of the rodeo, where we spoke to Princess, the eloquent, soft-spoken treasurer of the committee, who had similarly explained why the group started. The women have grown in these past four years. They have built their own community centre with the money raised, a simple clay-brick and wood structure, in which they conduct sewing, cooking and craft classes, they have group support sessions, they do preparation of food for weddings, parties and social occasions. One of their proudest achievements is a library for the community and the school children. In the process, they have gained recognition and so been able to receive financial and other help from a number of national and international organisations, primarily the International Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture, or IICA as it’s more familiarly known. The library was donated by the Canadian Rotarians. And it is here within the compound that their cashew nut factory is housed. This was the reason we had gone to visit them. One of their primary projects is the production of packaged cashew nuts which they started about two years ago.

The cashew tree is related to poison ivy, and the shell of the cashew nut contains an irritating poison. People who touch the shell sometimes develop skin blisters, but roasting removes all poison from the nuts. The cashew tree is native to Central America and other tropical regions. The first cashew trees in India were brought from South America. The trees sometimes reach a height of 12 metres. They have large, leathery, green leaves up to 15 centimetres long and 10 centimetres wide. Each fruit of the cashew contains one nut. In addition to the nut, people eat the fleshy red or yellow base of the fruit, called the cashew apple. The apple may be eaten raw or made into a preserve. Cashew trees belong to the cashew family, Anacardiaceae.

There are four stages in the production of packaged cashew nuts. First, nuts are purchased from suppliers in North, Central and South Rupununi, and Brazil. They are dried for three days and then stockpiled according to grade – small, medium and large in large wooden bins. The project has the capacity to store nuts for up to six months.

Stage two is the frying of the nuts. Initially done in 15L of cooking oil, the nuts eventually develop their own oil. The nuts are fried in batches of about 20 kgs; and according to grade. Large nuts are fried for eight minutes, medium for five minutes and small for three minutes. They are then put into cooling trays for about twenty minutes. This must be done outdoors as the frying nuts emit a strong, acrid smell which burns one’s eyes, nostrils and throat. A carelessly drawn breath results in the smell making its way down to one’s stomach, and renders the unsuspecting breather, the victim of a severe coughing fit. It seemed to make sense to draw in as much air as possible before going anywhere near the shed. Unfortunately, one’s air supply could not be stockpiled like the nuts, and so those of us who were visiting were gasping for air with tears streaming down our faces. Ashley, the sole male employed by the women’s group, was in charge of the frying of the nuts, and seemed totally unaffected by the smell and smoke, and he had some merry moments taking in our somewhat comical attempts to conduct an interview or shoot footage without breathing!

Stage three is the cracking and scooping of the nuts. Standing in front of contraptions that look as if they were intended to be some ancient torture machine, two women each operate the pedal on their machine, cracking open the shell of each nut individually. It looks like a painfully long and tedious process and they wear industrial gloves to protect their hands both from the nuts which are sometimes still hot and the vicious looking blades between which they must crack each nut. After cracking, they pass the nuts through a small window to the woman on the other side of the device. It is now her job to remove the shells and sort the nuts according to quality – be they whole or smaller pieces.

The nuts are now ready for the drying and they are placed, again in trays, into the solar dryers in the yard. The solar dryers are a simple pen-like structure, with plastic ceiling and mesh sides. The nuts are left for one day and then taken inside again to be cleaned. Remember, after the cracking, they still would have been coated with shell fragments and would have borne traces of the frying. They are then returned to the dryers for a further two days. The final stage of the production is when the cleaned and dried nuts are once again sorted according to grade – whole or broken – and packaged accordingly. The women produce packages in two sizes – 100 and 250 grams. For local consumption, i.e., within the community only, they produce a fine cashew nut powder, which can be used as a wholesome snack when walking the long distances in the Rupununi. Mixed with sugar and farine – a staple diet of the Amerindians, used in place of rice – the cashew nut powder can also serve as a health drink mix or may even be used as an ingredient for baking.

Lynette, the secretary of the women’s group, explained that a number of the women had recently returned from Georgetown, the capital city, where they had met with the distributor for their nuts. I asked if they had targeted markets in Brazil, but apparently the Brazilians think the nuts too expensive. They did express an interest however, in accessing the internet market. Before we left, we made sure we got our hands on some of the nuts and determined that we would save them for our trip down the long trail. Upon our return to Georgetown, we went into one of the more popular supermarkets in search of the cashew nuts. We discovered that they were a hot item and had already been sold out. We would have to wait for our next trip it seemed, before we got some more.