The History of Cashew in Sri Lanka

The cashew tree is native to Brazil, not Sri Lanka. It reached this side of the world in the 16th century, carried by Portuguese sailors who were moving plants from the Americas across their trading routes — the same voyages that introduced cashew to Malacca and parts of East Africa around the same period.

Cashew wasn't planted as a food crop at first. Like in several other Portuguese ports of call, it was valued early on for holding sandy, erosion-prone soil near the coast — the nut itself came later, almost as a byproduct of a tree planted for a different reason.

For a long stretch after its arrival, cashew in Sri Lanka stayed informal — trees scattered through the dry zone, grown in home gardens and along boundaries rather than cultivated as an organized agricultural export. It wasn't bred, irrigated, or managed with much intent; it simply grew well in dry, marginal land that wasn't good for much else, and that was reason enough to keep it around.

That changed only after independence, when cashew started to be looked at as an actual industry rather than a tree that happened to produce something useful.

The turning point was 1973, with the establishment of the Sri Lanka Cashew Corporation. Through the 1970s, the Corporation ran the first real push to cultivate cashew deliberately — setting up state-owned plantations across the Northern, Eastern, and North Western provinces, which in turn encouraged private growers to plant their own.

One of the more charming artifacts of that era survives on the A3 highway near Bataleeya, where a stretch of road is still known as Kajugama — literally "cashew village" — lined with roadside stalls selling cashews to passing travelers. The colony there was established and later revamped during President Premadasa's time in office, as a way to give local villagers a livelihood tied directly to the crop.

Cashew now grows across most of Sri Lanka's dry zone — Vavuniya, Mannar, Jaffna, Kurunegala, Batticaloa, Hambantota, and more — but Puttalam has remained one of the most significant districts for it since those early state plantations were established in the North Western province. It's dry, it's coastal-adjacent, and it's exactly the kind of marginal land cashew has always done well on in Sri Lanka, which is part of why the Cashew Corporation still runs a research unit there today.

It's also why we source from Puttalam specifically rather than buying generic "Sri Lankan cashew" through a broker — the district's growers have four decades of institutional know-how behind them that newer growing areas simply don't have yet.

Despite that history, Sri Lanka still produces only around 10,000 metric tons of raw cashew a year against roughly double that in domestic demand — the gap is filled by imports. Yields per tree remain well below what's achieved in major producing countries, mostly because cashew here is still grown with less investment and more manual labor than large exporters like Vietnam, India, and Brazil put into theirs.

There's real movement on that front, though: a research partnership between the Cashew Corporation and Wayamba University has released several higher-yielding varieties since the mid-2000s, some offering two to three times the output of older trees. It's a slow crop to improve — a cashew tree takes years to mature — but the direction is the right one for an industry that's spent most of its 400-year history as an afterthought rather than a focus.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like our guides to the story behind the word kaju, how a cashew is grown and processed, Ceylon cashews for Sri Lankans abroad and where cashew trees grow.