Massogbè Touré Diabaté, pioneer of the cashew nut industry in Côte d’Ivoire

Today, Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s leading cashew nut producer and exporter, partly thanks to Massogbè Touré Diabaté. More than 30 years ago, the Ivorian embarked on an adventure that might have seemed trivial at the time: growing cashew trees. Today, her company, the SITA Group, exports worldwide, mainly to the United States and the Gulf States, and employs more than 800 people.

In Côte d’Ivoire, Touré Diabaté’s company is one of the leaders in the cashew industry. A few years ago, while working as a sales executive for a company, she had the opportunity to travel to India, where she discovered the economic potential of cashew nuts. A crop which, at the time, was not very valued in her country, Côte d’Ivoire.

At the end of the 1980s, she began growing cashew trees, which are known to be fire-resistant and limiting the advance of the desert. She planted her first cashew trees on an area of 5 hectares and used her first harvest as seeds, which she distributed to a number of local farmers.

From this experience, she founded the Cooperative of Cashew Planters in Côte d’Ivoire (COPLACI). In 2000, she founded SITA SA (Ivorian Cashew Processing Company), the first plant of its kind in Côte d’Ivoire. The group has cashew crops on 200 hectares. Today, the company exports more than 20,000 tonnes of cashew nuts a year, mainly to the United States and the Gulf States. In 2022, Côte d’Ivoire exported more than 1.2 million raw nuts, the equivalent of 40% of world supply.

In addition to Côte d’Ivoire, she is committed to promoting the cashew Industry throughout Africa. In 2005, she set up the Association for the Industrial Development of the African Cashew Industry (Adefica), which brings together 11 African cashew-producing countries.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cotton and Cashew Council (CCA) in Côte d’Ivoire, which brings together public, private and industrial entities in the two fields. She was also vice-president of the General Confederation of Enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire.