Cashew Economy of India

Cashew is a plantation crop introduced into India from Brazil. It is one of the horticultural and commercial crops grown in India. India is the country had taken all the effort to cultivate in a larger scale as a commercial crop for its nutritious kernel and developed technologies to extract the kernel without much damage from the raw nut. Cashew is one of the valuable nuts produced from Cashew plantations which are so popular in Ariyalur District of Tamil Nadu. Many of the households whom are cultivating the Cashew plantations are also directly involved in extraction of Cashew from Cashew nut and are actively involved in marketing of Cashew by keeping the packed Cashew kernels along the highways and are earning their bread. Though Cashew production in India and Tamil Nadu are popular, it is also imported from few countries and are processed in Indian soils and again they are exported to different nations after performing grading operations. Since it is practiced at household level and in processing industries also, an effort has been taken by the authors to assess the cultivation practices following improved technologies, processing activities in vogue with them, nutritional importance, pharmacological importance and the trading practices associated with it. How economical it is? How it serves as a nutritional product to the human being. How convenient they feel in performing marketing and trading operations are not much documented in the form of a book and hence our experiences are shared in the form of a book titled as “Cashew Economy of India”. Hope this book will be of much useful to the field functionaries whom are involved in the Cashew industry and it will be a handy material for the cultivators and technocrats.