LISTENING TO yet another podcast this week, I almost got knocked down by a boda-boda in Luzira because I came to a sudden stop to pay attention to what I was hearing.

Before you proceed with reading this, get yourself some roasted gnuts and start munching on them.

The UK-based ‘The Week Unwrapped – with Olly Mann’ podcast focused one segment this week on Dubai Chocolate, which is not just chocolate that is sold in Dubai.

A British-Egyptian lady called Sarah Hamouda was driven in 2021 by her pregnancy cravings to create a chocolate bar that she filled with pistachio nuts and some other things from her culture.

Cutting a long story short, some social media influencers picked up one of these chocolate bars, fell in love with it, and took it to TikTok. The rest is part of the rich history of this nut that we rarely see in Uganda.

The global pistachio market is reportedly US$44.8 billion strong and should reach US$58.5 billion by 2030. (Choose an African country and compare our national GDP numbers to those nuts.)

Now, the reason I stopped dangerously short on my walk listening to this story is the details that followed:

Largely because of the social media kaboozi about Dubai chocolate, the world is now experiencing a surge in the prices of pistachios that fill up the sweet snack.

In some places,, a 200-gram bar of Dubai chocolate now costs £20 (UGX100,000)!!!!

Why? There is a global shortage of pistachios because the chocolate has been made so popular and only works if it has pistachios.

Also – not as a side note – last year’s harvest of pistachios in the United States was disappointing.

Unlike many of you, I have a regular supply of pistachios, as my wife has a good friend of Iranian citizenship who visits her Uganda home frequently. I introduce Iran into this because that is the origin of these nuts – Iran, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern countries.

For thousands of years that area dominated the production and supply of pistachios, until the US woke up to it back in the 1930s and got seeds from Iran. These nuts, small as they are, are a HIGH-VALUE product.

Along the way, the US raised a trade embargo on Iran but eased it for pistachios to get through, but then they introduced high tariffs on the nuts from Iran.

Within years, the US had developed their production of pistachios so much so that they started exporting the nuts to China, leaving Iran to only export to Europe and the wider Middle East.

The war of pistachios has run for decades now, and today the US and Iran control almost 80% of the global pistachio trade – which is getting more and more valuable by the day.

In fact, I suspect that’s the reason why pistachios have such good PR – as opposed to our binyeebwa (groundnuts) here in East Africa. Note: In 2023 the pistachio was named ‘Nut Of The Year.’ See? IMAGINE! There are awards for this.

Yes, this is NUTS we are talking about. Gwe, the Americans even have an ‘Administrative Committee for Pistachios’ that “regulates the handling of pistachios produced in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.”

It sets standards for the quality of pistachios and regulates over 99.99% of all these nuts produced in the US.

Their stats say that there are 23 handlers processing pistachios grown by more than 1,000 producers over 200,000 acres (five times the size of Kampala).

Anyway, in 2008 the US surpassed Iran to become the world’s largest exporter of pistachios after Iran was hit by a drought on top of the US tariffs.

Am I talking too much about nuts?

Yes.

Because we are obviously nuts for not going nuts about nuts. We can Be Serious about our own nuts after understanding the value in that industry.

On the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) website, Uganda says, “Groundnut, also known as peanut, is the second most important legume after beans in Uganda. It is also the sixth most important oilseed crop in the world.”

For some reason they write ‘groundnut’ instead of ‘groundnuts’, so please start changing, Ugandan out there (did you get it?).

Then: “The average yield of groundnuts in Uganda is about 290kg per acre as opposed to the yield potential of 1,200kg per acre. Some of the major constraints to enhanced groundnut productivity include a) Lack of fertilizers b) Low use of quality seed c) Low use of agrochemicals d) Susceptibility to rosette disease e) Poor market linkages for produce…”

People, it is clear where the problem is and how we can fix it, besides sending a pregnant woman with cravings to Dubai to create a chocolate product that will create massive global demand for our groundnut(s).

But first, as I said, we need to go nuts over our nuts the way the Iranians did over theirs and infected the Americans.

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Simon Kaheru

www.skaheru.com
@skaheru