Malawi tobacco revenue to beat target
With only a month to the closure of this year’s tobacco marketing season, the leaf’s revenue is fast rising and set to beat the $300 million (K103 billion) target. Latest figures put sales proceeds at $296 million (K102 billion) in 18 weeks of sales.
The proceeds have jumped 6.4 percent from last week’s $278.33 million (K95 billion).
Already, Limbe Auction Floors wound up sales of burley, grown by a majority of smallholder farmers, on Friday, but sales of flue cured are still continuing, according to Tobacco Control Commission (TCC) public relations officer Juliana Somba-Banda.
“But the sales of flue cured will run for the next two weeks,” she said.
Somba-Banda said dates when the other markets, Lilongwe, Chinkhoma in Kasungu and Mzuzu, will close have not yet been fixed, but the expectation is that the whole marketing season will be over by end of August.
A weekly report from Auction Holdings Limited (AHL) indicates that the leaf has raked in $295.8 million out of 138.9 million kilogrammes (kg) at an average price of $2.13 (K734) per kg.
TCC has just revised upwards the output for this year’s leaf to 162 million kg from the earlier 156 million kg. This means that with 138.9 million kg sold thus far, 23 million kg of the leaf is yet to be sold.
Figures indicate that burley with 118.8 million kg sold, has raked in $235.9 million at an average price of $1.99 per kg, flue cured has brought in $53.3 million in revenue at an average price of $3.13 per kg with 17 million kg of the leaf sold.
Dark fired has raised $6.5 million out of three million kg of the leaf sold at an average price of $2.15 per kg, according to AHL figures.
Last week, was a short selling week with a general trend of decreasing throughput, resulting in a drop of volume sold by 1.5 million kg.
“Burley average prices for the week rose by two percent with a new daily average price set on Monday at $2.58 per kg. A 13 percent increase in flue cured volumes sold in the week resulted in an overall impressive jump of weekly average price by $0.12,” reads a commentary from the tobacco auctioneer.
Dark fired prices also suffered another drop due to relative lack of competition on the crop as a result of few buyers, said AHL.
Tobacco is Malawi’s main foreign exchange earner wiring in more than half of the forex proceeds and accounts for 13 percent of the national economy.
