Mozambique: No barriers to free export of pigeon peas to India, says CTA - Watch
Magazine Independente / João Macaringue
The director of the Mozambique Grain Institute (ICM), Joao Macaringue, and the Indian High Commissioner to Mozambique, Rudra Gaurav Shresth, on Wednesday insisted that Mozambique can continue exporting pigeon peas to India, despite the restriction on imports of this crop announced by India in August.
Known in India as dal, pigeon peas are a key component of Indian cuisine.
Speaking alongside the High Commissioner at a Maputo press conference, Macaringue said Mozambique is the only country in the world not affected by the restrictions, thanks to a memorandum of understanding between the two countries, signed when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Mozambique in 2016.
“This agreement envisages an annual quota of 125,000 tonnes”, he said. “What remains to be exported this year is 78,000 tonnes”.
This follows a bitter complaint on Tuesday by Ana Tauacale, chairperson of the Natonal Union of Peasants (UNAC), who said that Mozambican peasant farmers had been “betrayed”, since they had been encouraged to grow pigeon peas, but now found there was no market for the crop.
“There was a betrayal”, she declared. “Many businesses, when the agricultural campaign was launched, told the peasants they should produce a lot of pigeon peas, because they would buy them. And we did produce a lot. The barns are full, and now that the time for sales has arrived, they say there’s no market”.
She claimed that the promises from private traders and from the government were such that some peasants prioritised pigeon peas over their normal food crops.
“We believed that we would sell the pigeon peas, and with the money from those sales we would buy other products”, Tuacale said. “But without a market, we will have no way of making these purchases. We will have to make sacrifices, perhaps we will have to sell part of the food crops we thought we were going to keep, in order to pay for education, health, transport and other expenses”.
This crisis led a Mozambican delegation to visit India earlier this month, where it found that Mozambique was being cheated because some non-Mozambican exporters were selling pigeon peas to India using part of the Mozambican quota.
“A good part of the 125,000 tonne quota was exported by operators who are not based in Mozambique but who have obtained Mozambican certificates of origin”, Macaringue said. To avoid this problem in the future, the Mozambican and India authorities have agreed that all sales of pigeon peas to India must be coordinated by the ICM.
Macaringue said that all exporters of pigeon peas must register with the ICM. “This will allow us not only to control the quota, but fundamentally to manage the traders in pigeon peas”.
He also explained that India has promised to provide a sum of between five and 10 million US dollars so that pigeon peas in excess of the quota can be conserved for later sales. Macaringue said that memoranda of understanding have been signed with major operators interested in this crop, some of whom work in Brazil.
“We were aware that, even with Indian support, we would continue to have pigeon peas in the hands of the producers, and so we took action while we were in India to find other potential buyers”, he said. “There are two companies which, as from now, will take the surplus that is not covered by the quota exported to India”.
Also Read: Modi arrives in Mozambique, will sign MoU on pulses import to meet India’s demand
There is one Mozambican factory which processes pigeon peas in Beira – but Tuacale said that peasant farmers know nothing about it.
“We have no clear information about how this factory is going to work”, she said. “We are still waiting for information about it”.
Owned by the Export Trading Group (ETG), the Beira factory was inaugurated by President Filipe Nyusi in August 2016. It has the capacity to process 80 tonnes of pigeon peas a day, and planned to export 22,000 tonnes to India this year.
Also Read: Unsold pigeon peas at risk of rotting in Cabo Delgado
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