The lowly cashew is globalisation in a nutshell. The route from cashew tree to tasty snack follows a peripatetic journey. More than half of the world’s cashew nuts are grown in African countries. Most are exported raw, mainly to Vietnam, for shelling and sorting, before being exported again as processed kernels. Often the nuts munched by Americans or Europeans have travelled more than 20,000km.

African countries lament being the bottom link in global supply chains for cashews and other commodities. A rule of thumb in agro-processing is that just 10-15% of the cost of the final product, say a bag of roasted cashews, goes to the farmer in the country of origin. If more processing is done in Africa, goes the logic, the continent will create jobs and capture more of the $8bn cashew market.

This is why African countries—most of which export predominantly unprocessed commodities—are studying the parable of the Ivorian cashew. Fifteen years ago Ivory Coast, the world’s largest grower of cashews, exported nearly all of its crop as raw nuts. But last year about 30% of its harvest was processed at home; the government aims to increase that to 50% by 2030. Its efforts hold lessons for those who feel Africa gets a raw deal from its raw materials.

After Ivory Coast’s civil war ended in 2011 the government made it a priority to do more processing. The timing was fortuitous. In the 2000s Vietnam supplanted India as the global hub for turning raw nuts into kernels. It did this by mechanising tasks once done by nimble hands—cutting, shelling and peeling. This reduced the cost of processing from about $600 per tonne to $200. Factories that employed 3,000 people in India had 400 in Vietnam. This made businesses consider using the same technology, but closer to where the nuts are grown and eaten.

The Ivorian government, seeing an opening, introduced incentives for domestic and foreign-owned processors. Firms pay no import duties on machinery. They receive a subsidy of about $700 per tonne of processed kernels exported, or 10% of the price paid by the buyer. A regulator was given clout and staffed by competent technocrats. There was consistent high-level support, including from Alassane Ouattara, the president, and his late prime minister, Amadou Gon Coulibaly.

Foreign expertise has been critical. “Agro-processing in theory sounds simple, but it is very technical. It’s food science and business mixed together,” notes Jonathan Said of AGRA, an NGO headquartered in Nairobi. Ivory Coast convinced Olam, a Singaporean firm, to build the first big factories. Several foreign firms have followed.

One is Cashew Coast, which was set up by Mauritians but has investors from all over. Visitors to its factory in Bouaké, a city in central Ivory Coast, are given headphones to block the deafening noise from the machines that cook, shell, dry, peel and sort the nuts. Many are high-tech: one scanner uses optical laser technology to spot defects. Software from SAP, a German tech firm, allows the firm to trace the origin of every shipment. Ivorian women deftly peel the last 15% of shells left by the machines, just as efficiently as their Vietnamese peers, reckons the head of operations.

Salma Seetaroo, the CEO of Cashew Coast, says that “Africa is increasingly delivering a greater value equation.” Processing a tonne of cashews at Vietnamese factories remains cheaper than in Ivory Coast, but brands such as hers are competitive. The cashews taste better, she points out, because they are processed at source and not sitting on a ship for months. Freight costs and carbon emissions are lower. European demand for traceable and “sustainable” produce mean buyers are willing to pay a premium. Concerns that Ivorian factories produce too many broken nuts are less relevant these days, as fragments can be turned into lots of products, including vegan “cheese”.

Donald Trump’s trade war will raise the price of cashews for American snackers. But some in Ivory Coast see a potential upside if it ends up with a lower tariff than Vietnam. “The whole tariff thing could give firms reason to relocate some of their operations from Asia to Africa,” hopes an adviser to Mr Ouattara.

Yet Ivory Coast still has work to do before it can say it has cracked the cashew-nut industry. Foreign-owned firms, which account for about 70% of exports, do not need the government’s subsidy to turn a profit. But for Ivorian outfits it can be the difference between survival and bankruptcy. As ever in industrial policy, there is a fine line between supporting a nascent export industry and indulging firms with no hope. In a worrying sign of protectionism, last year the government briefly suspended the export of raw nuts to ensure supply to locally owned factories.

That step also reflected a deeper problem: the need to guarantee a long-term supply of raw nuts. Farmers’ yields are low compared with those in countries like Cambodia, which has large plantations. In Ivory Coast, as in most of Africa, cashew farmers are smallholders. “There is no such thing as a cashew farmer,” notes Jim Fitzpatrick, a cashew-nut expert: “There are farmers with some cashew trees.” Shoddy storage leads to too much waste. Only a few firms, including Cashew Coast, try to improve farmers’ productivity.

At a village an hour’s drive from Bouaké one farmer says he earned the equivalent of $700 from cashews last year. Will he invest the money in his plot? “I want a motorbike,” he replies. “That way I can take my daughter to look for work at a factory.” These days that is not a nutty idea.