SEPI Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales

• The goal of the event was the official launching of the harvesting campaign for this fruit, generating a meeting place for the different players in the industry
• Since 2010 the Company is developing the CTARS Project: the Commercialization and Processing of the Cashew in the Sikasso Región

The town of Bougouni (Mali) was the venue on March 14th – 16th of the 5th series of the Cashew Annual Meeting. The symposia took place in three stages; the first was of an institutional nature, while the second had a technical character, and the third was focused on determining the price for this farm product at the domestic level.

In the opening of the meetings took part a number of representatives from the Mali Administration, among them the Chief of Staff of the Governor of the Sikasso region, the Prefect of the Bougouni province, the Mayor and traditional chief of Bougouni, the Technical Advisor from the Ministry of Agriculture, the National President of the Agrarian Chamber, and the National Director for Farming and the Regional Director for Farming, as well as the Coordinator for Spanish Cooperation.

Producers’ active participation

The series has been characterized by the active participation from the producers, as well as that from the state processors and services, in the technical presentations and thematic round tables, which encouraged the representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture to continue supporting the industry.

This has been the fifth time in which Grupo TRAGSA and the National Directorate for Agriculture have organized this event, whose goal is determining a starting price for Mali’s cashew nut for the 2016 Campaign, and generating a B2B (business to business) space for establishing commercial links among the industry’s players, with a high presence of traders from neighboring countries, such as Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso.

CTARS Project

Since 2010, Grupo TRAGSA develops in Mali, under the overview of the National Directorate for Agriculture and financed by the Spanish Agency for International Development and Cooperation (AECID) one of its most noteworthy actions outside Spain: the CTARS Project, or “Commercialization and Processing of the Cashew from the Sikasso Region”.

TRAGSA and Grupo SEPI

TRAGSA is part of Grupo SEPI, a corporate holding which includes a total of 16 state-owned companies in which it has direct, majority shareholding participations, with a workforce of around 73,000 professionals in 2014; the Spanish state-owned television and radio corporation, Corporación Radiotelevisión Española, which is attached to SEPI, and one public foundation. Equally, SEPI has direct minority shareholdings in a further ten companies, and indirect shareholdings in more than one hundred companies.