In the second of a two-part installment for roape.net, Klas Lundström Martínez argues that Guinea-Bissau’s colonial cashew monoculture created a permanent system of economic dependency that survived socialism, structural adjustment, and the rise of a narco‑state, with women’s invisible labour holding the entire economy together. The first part of this long read can be found here.
The dominant cashew economy had established patterns that outlasted independence in 1974. By then, Amílcar Cabral was already dead, assassinated by Portuguese agents in Conakry the previous year. He never had the opportunity to test his agronomic theories against political reality. For a monocrop-dependent economy that had never been industrialized, Guinea-Bissau quickly found itself reliant on the same revenue sources that had sustained the Portuguese empire.
Although PAIGC harboured progressive ambitions for diversifying both the economy and the agricultural landscape, the technical knowledge, capital, and market leverage required by a starving, war-exhausted population were simply not available. The aspiration for land reform was political oxygen for the movement, now led by Cabral’s half-brother Luís Cabral. Ambitious reform programs were launched: agriculture was collectivized, state-financed farms and cooperatives were established, supplemented by schools and health posts.
Cashew nuts retained their place in the economy—a total phase-out would have meant economic catastrophe in the absence of alternative export revenues. But the cooperatives, whatever their stated ambitions, frequently reproduced the traditional gender roles they were supposed to dismantle. Women continued to perform heavy field labour while men dominated better-paid positions in processing facilities.
The post-independence state had inherited not only the cashew tree but the gendered division of labour that had grown up around it. PAIGC’s official commitment to women’s emancipation—and it was real, more so than in most independence movements of the era—ran aground on the economic structures that colonial agriculture had embedded deep in rural social life.
Structural constraints proved stubborn across every sector. The scarcity of educated Bissau-Guineans hampered industrialization. Capital arrived from the Soviet Union and Cuba, but PAIGC failed to secure export agreements for processed cashew nuts—which would have allowed the country to capture more value from its dominant crop and begin the break from raw-commodity dependency that Cabral’s analysis demanded. Centuries of underdevelopment weighed heavier than a few years of progressive governance. The cashew nut remained the reliable choice for farmers growing for income, at the expense of the diversification that PAIGC had made its article of faith.
The 1980 military coup that brought João Bernardo ‘Nino’ Vieira to power accelerated existing fault lines between city and countryside, between ethnic communities, and between coastal and interior regions—precisely the divisions Cabral had spent his political career working to overcome. New economic priorities favoured coastal regions where processing facilities were concentrated, while the rural producers who had formed the guerrilla’s backbone were marginalized. The coastal elite’s control over state cashew companies entrenched an ethno-economic hierarchy that looked, in its essentials, like a repatriated version of the colonial hierarchy it had replaced.
Structural adjustment and the second dispossession
Independence in 1974 brought political sovereignty but not economic autonomy. The new state inherited a colonial infrastructure that was designed for extraction rather than development. The funding of a welfare state started from scratch and accumulated debt within an economic system that had been tied to international interests rather than domestic prosperity. When Guinea-Bissau’s fiscal crisis deepened in the early 1980s, the government turned to international lenders as a last resort.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) arrived in the 1980s with structural adjustment packages. The premise was that liberalized competition would produce better-distributed resources and economic growth. The reality was a second dispossession—less dramatic than the first but no less thorough.
Austerity hollowed out the state, leaving fewer resources for welfare provision than at any point since independence. Public services painstakingly built during the PAIGC reform years were dismantled at the insistence of creditors who had no stake in their survival. Price stabilisation mechanisms were removed, delivering Guinea-Bissau’s cashew production into the hands of international actors. Local producers were compelled to accept whatever prices were offered while intermediaries tied to international capital captured the margin. State assets were sold off to salvage short-term solvency. Schools closed and health clinics vanished.
The colonial economic architecture had been maintained—only the flags had changed. What structural adjustment added to the colonial legacy was the removal of even the limited buffer mechanisms that the post-independence state had managed to install. If the colonial system had made Guinea-Bissau’s smallholders dependent on the cashew market, structural adjustment ensured there was no institutional actor capable of mediating that dependency.
For women, the consequences were immediate and direct. What expanded in the wake of state contraction was the informal sector, and within it, small-scale cashew trading became a family survival strategy—an improvised response to the withdrawal of formal economic structures. Women absorbed the shock. But this informalization once again rendered their labour invisible in official statistics, continuing a pattern of gendered erasure that stretched back to the colonial administration’s ledgers.
The structural adjustment programs demanded by Washington and Brussels measured formal markets and formal employment, both of which contracted. They did not measure the informal economy that absorbed the blow—disproportionately on women’s backs, as it had always done.
The logic of permanent bondage operated here with particular clarity. At each stage of Guinea-Bissau’s economic history—colonial extraction, post-independence reform, structural adjustment—women’s unacknowledged labour in cashew cultivation and processing provided the floor that kept households alive and the system functional. When the formal economy contracted, that floor held. When the state withdrew, that floor held. The system could afford to fail at every level above subsistence precisely because subsistence was being provided, without payment or recognition, by women.
The ‘narco-state’
Guinea-Bissau’s geography had always made it profitable for smuggling—particularly in the Bijagós archipelago, with its more than eighty islands and complex coastal waterways. As the cocaine boom of the 1980s expanded, the country became an ideal staging ground for South American drug traffickers supplying European markets. The shattered institutions of the failed neoliberal social project paved the way for a collapsed state, effectively open for criminal occupation.
Political leaders, military figures, and economic actors became enmeshed in the lucrative narcotics trade. Documented traffickers obtained senior positions in state-owned enterprises—including the national oil company Petroguim—underscoring the fusion of state apparatus and cartel operations that would eventually prompt analysts to describe Guinea-Bissau as the first ‘narco-state’ in Africa. A series of coups, coup attempts, and chronically unstable governments made the 1990s and 2000s more or less lost decades.
The cashew economy played a structural role in enabling this outcome. The absence of alternative revenue sources drained the treasury, while cartels offered poorly paid public servants—including the political and military elite—large sums in exchange for information, services, or active involvement in smuggling networks. Political manoeuvring became as much about controlling cartel operations as about governing. The brinksmanship between failed state and criminal enterprise was not accidental; it was the predictable endpoint of decades in which legal economic options had been systematically narrowed by colonial extraction, structural adjustment, and political instability.
A 1993 banknote of Guinea-Bissau, with an image of Amílcar Cabral on the right-hand side.
What the narco-state formation did not change was the gendered structure of the cashew economy at its base. Women continued to cultivate, process, and sell nuts in small volumes, sustaining households that the state had long since stopped serving. The narco-economy operated above them; their subsistence labour operated beneath it; and the two were connected only by the continued absence of any alternative. Cabral’s warning—that the cashew monoculture produced permanent dependency—had been vindicated at every level of the system, from the peasant farm to the presidential palace.
Guinea-Bissau’s years of structural adjustment programs had simply accelerated what the colonial cashew economy had initiated: the systematic erosion of any capacity for self-determination, whether economic, nutritional or political.
The 2025 coup and the IMF’s Guinea-Bissau
At the end of November 2025, the latest in a long series of military coups took place under circumstances that remain disputed. Questions remain open about whether it constituted a genuine ousting of President Umaro Sissoco Embaló—controversial and increasingly authoritarian—or a choreographed transition among factions of the same elite. What is clear is that the coup arrived as Guinea-Bissau was once again caught in the lending institutions’ revolving door.
The most recent IMF loan package, from 2024, was accompanied by economic forecasts projecting growth of over five per cent and reduced poverty on the basis of favourable cashew prices on world markets. These projections rested on the same unstable ground as earlier decades’ development optimism: assumptions of stable commodity prices, continued political stability, and a state capable of converting export revenues into broader welfare. The historical record offers no support for any of those assumptions. The IMF presupposed, in other words, a Guinea-Bissau that has never existed.
The new military junta’s summary arrest of PAIGC leadership and the installation of a military-led government composed of the deposed president’s closest allies suggests that Guinea-Bissau may be moving from a failed state to a systematic ‘narco-state’—a sort of non-state existence whose primary efficiency lies in elite accumulation through criminal and extractive operations while systematically excluding the population from political participation or economic benefit.
France’s rather muted reaction to the coup is revealing and contextualized by the former colonial power’s lost influence in West Africa. Even more telling still is TotalEnergies’ continued interest in potential deepwater oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea, rooted in France’s diminishing influence across its former colonial sphere.
The ongoing overlap between European-encouraged oil prospecting and South American-controlled narcotics trafficking routes shows how legal and illegal extraction have merged into a single, mutually reinforcing system. Guinea-Bissau’s territory is simultaneously a site of speculative energy capital and transnational crime—two forms of accumulation by dispossession that together ensure the country’s resources flow outward while its population remains impoverished.
The tree is still there
Amílcar Cabral’s insight was that colonial underdevelopment was a system, not a condition, and that a system cannot be dismantled by replacing its personnel while leaving its structures intact. Fifty years of independence have borne him out. The cashew monoculture that the Portuguese installed in the 1840s as a mechanism of control has outlasted the Portuguese empire, the liberation struggle, the socialist reform programme, structural adjustment, and the narco-state alike. It has outlasted everything except the dispossession it was designed to produce.
That dispossession has always been gendered. At every stage—colonial plantation, post-independence cooperative, structural adjustment’s informal sector, narco-economy’s subsistence floor—women’s unacknowledged labour in cashew cultivation and processing has provided the foundation on which everything else rested. It has been invisible to every government and every lending institution. Its invisibility is not an oversight. It is a structural feature of the system, as indispensable to cashew capitalism as the tree itself.
The colony that Amílcar Cabral and PAIGC liberated from Portuguese rule and sought to transform into a project for African socialism has instead become a case study in how mono-resource exploitation, neoliberal structural adjustment, and European demand for recreational drugs combine to produce permanent underdevelopment. Whether a state captured by criminal networks and rendered dependent on narcotics trafficking and cheap raw material exports can be returned to a genuine welfare project—with popular wellbeing as its political priority—remains an open question. The historical trajectory does not encourage optimism.
The cashew tree is still there, at the centre of it all. It has survived the fall of colonialism, the reforms of the revolution, and the austerity of structural adjustment. It is not only a symbol of colonial violence and economic apartheid but an embodiment of the colonial legacies that continue to shape the present—a measure of how little in Guinea‑Bissau has actually changed.
It also reminds us that what Cabral described as a permanent colonial bondage does not require chains to function; it requires only a crop, a captive market, and the unacknowledged labour of women who have never stopped holding the system together. In that sense, the cashew nut—and the political instability that has accompanied it—is the closest thing Guinea‑Bissau has to continuity. Or, as put by Bissau-Guinean poet Gisela Casimiro:
You have the height of the roots that hold the earth to its axis.