All

So this was the long awaited Election week. Monday was a holiday for the poll to take place and after a long day of voting, with many polling stations having stayed open into the night to allow for all voters to cast their ballot, Tuesday normal life returned to Addis. Many locations, deemed unsafe, will have their poll in September. In Tigray, where hostilities are ongoing, no date for the Elections has been announced. Results will start to trickle in from now onwards but final results are not expected for weeks.

All warehouses are open and activity continues. This week we loaded containers, drew PSS and even managed to buy some coffee! Logistical constraints are ongoing but no worse than they were one or two weeks ago. Unprocessed coffee has started to flow again from the interior to Addis as the poll has been largely peaceful in the locations where it was possible to be carried out. In some areas of Djimmah/Limu where there were some instances of insecurity it could take a little longer for coffee to start flowing to Addis.  

The Government continues to reject perceived meddling in its internal affairs by foreign nations. Fighting has intensified in some areas in Tigray and the Airforce was accused of dropping airborne bombs on civilians killing dozens of people at an open air market. There really seems to be no end in sight to suffering for a population ravaged by war and hunger.

There is little trading activity at the moment, shippers are over committed and reluctant to sell more; likewise importers are very much focused on seeing coffee get on vessels rather than buying more; this is a time of the year where the focus is much more on execution than on trading!

We have not looked at how the pandemic has been developing in Ethiopia for a number of weeks now. Below the graph shows that the wave that peaked in the Spring is clearly receding. Furthermore the number of doses of the vaccine administered is at 2 Million, although small for a country that has a population in the tens of Millions, it is a start!

Birr43.60 = USD 1

Let’s hope that the calm environment is ongoing so that coffee continues to flow through the supply chain and on to vessels in Djibouti.

Have a good weekend.

All

For the 3rd month in a row shipments hit a new record, last May exports reached over 32 k MT a record for the month of May and indeed the highest monthly exports figure ever! Some Ethiopian insiders believe that these high Export figures are due to the upcoming ballot (June 21^st), no doubt that the ballot has focused minds to get coffee on vessels, however I believe that other factors, much more coffee related than political, explain these high numbers. Firstly, the 2020/21 crop is larger than the previous crop, therefore there is more coffee available. Secondly, prices have been very attractive for both overseas buyers and shippers, so export business has been brisk and in volume. While Brazil differentials remained fairly firm over the past couple months as NY rallied, Ethiopia Natural differentials weakened significantly attracting overseas buyers’ interest, like bees to honey! June shipments are likely to remain high, even with the disruption to flows around the Elections. Indeed we expect that shippers will remain under pressure and very busy for many weeks to come.

Logistics have been a struggle, in fact, if there were more containers available and if space on vessels was not constrained, we would have an even higher Export figure. Although shipping lines are the main guilty party in causing this bottleneck, at times of known potential instability, such as tribal tension and Elections, importers slow down their activity and run stocks down, resulting in less imports and a lower number of containers being imported, and therefore less containers available for exports.

The UN has declared that the northern region of Tigray has famine. The BBC explores this in the following article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57422168

Birr 43.30 = USD 1

Have a good weekend.