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.
Ghana is the world’s third-biggest exporter of unprocessed cashew nuts, behind Ivory Coast in first place, and Cambodia in second.
To produce the crop, around 300,000 Ghanaians make at least part of their living growing cashews.
Nashiru Seydou, whose family have a farm in the country’s north-east, some 500 miles (800km) from Accra, is one of them.
He says the work is hard, and unreliable supply chains and volatile wholesale prices make survival difficult.
“We are struggling. We can use the sunlight, the fertile land, to create more jobs,” he says. “I’d be happy if the government comes to our aid and helps support our industry.”
He tells me that he currently gets around $50 for a large 100kg sack of unshelled cashews.
“It’s amazing,” says Bright Simons, an entrepreneur and economic commentator in Accra, who has studied the numbers. “Roasters and retailers buy the nuts from farmers for $500 a tonne, and sell to customers [both at home and abroad] for amounts between $20,000 and $40,000 a tonne.”
As a whole, Ghana grows about 180,000 tonnes of cashews annually. More than 80% is exported, and in raw, unshelled form. This generates some $300m in export revenues, but means that Ghana misses out on the significantly higher returns you get from roasted, ready-to-eat cashews.
Mildred Akotia is one person trying to increase the amount of cashews that are shelled and roasted in Ghana. She is the founder and CEO of Akwaaba Fine Foods, which currently processes just 25 tonnes a year.
Ms Akotia denies any suggestion that she and others like her are price-gouging. The packaging and roasting machinery a western business would automatically use in this industry, she says, is out of reach for her because of the high cost of credit in Ghana.
“If you go to a local bank, it will cost you 30% interest to get a loan,” she complains. “As a manufacturer you tell me how large your margins are that you can afford that kind of interest? We’ve had to rely on what we can get: soft loans from relatives and grants from donor agencies.”
She says that this situation is why less than 20% of Ghana’s cashews are processed locally. The bulk are scooped up and exported to big factories in countries like India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Remarkably, some of those packaged nuts are then exported back to Ghana, where they are sold for the same price as domestically roasted cashews. This is despite the 20,000-mile sea freight round trip, and import costs.
It is a similar picture for rice, which is exported to Ghana from Asia and sold at low prices, despite Ghana also growing the crop itself.