INDIA WILL STILL IMPORT MOZAMBICAN

The Indian High Commissioner to Mozambique, Rudra Guarav, has pledged that India will continue to import pigeon peas from Mozambican farmers under the memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries last year, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Mozambique. But in August the Indian authorities appeared to renege on this memorandum, when they imposed quotas on pigeon pea imports, moving this crop from the “free” to the “restricted” category of imports. The new rules state that only 200,000 tonnes of pigeon peas (known in India as dal) can be imported in any one fiscal year. In the 2016/2017 fiscal year, which ended on 31 March, India imported 703,540 tonnes of pigeon peas, from many countries.Farmers in the northern province of Cabo Delgado who spoke to reporters blamed the Indian ban for the collapse in the producer price of pigeon peas. Before the ban, the price paid to farmers was 60 meticais (about one US dollar), a kilo, but the price has now fallen to 15 or even 10 meticais a kilo.

However, Guarav assured reporters that “Mozambican can remain calm. We are even willing to help this country diversify its production of beans, transmitting our experience with five types which would later be sold on the Indian market”.Cited by the Zitamar news agency, Guarav said he had been telling exporters that the Indian market is still open to their pigeon peas. “What the Mozambican exporters need to do is contact their buyers, the importers on the Indian side, and send the certificate of origin, clearly stating that the shipment is coming from Mozambique”, he said. “They can then use this to get permission from the director general of foreign trade, which has an office in every port, and they will give the importer an exemption certificate so that they can clear the shipment”.He said that this will only apply until an initial quota of 125,000 tonnes of pigeon peas is reached. So far this year about 32,000 tonnes have been imported from Mozambique, but Guarav expected the remaining 90,000 tonnes of the quota to be met within the next few weeks.

But total Mozambican production may well be greatly in excess of the quota, which will leave farmers with large amounts of unsold pigeon peas at risk of going rotten.As for the low producer prices, Guarav blamed unscrupulous traders. “The problem here is that the farmers are largely unaware of this whole dynamic”, he said, “because they sell directly to the traders. The price s largely fixed by the traders and so a certain amount of panic is probably being created deliberately by the traders so as to bring the price down further”.