Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe (GMAZ) president Tafadzwa Musarara said 30 000 tonnes of wheat is currently stuck in Beira, Mozambique, after the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe failed to avail foreign currency amounting to $12,2 million.
Musarara said the country is left with locally grown wheat, which needs to be blended with the imports to get high quality flour for baking. Said Musarara:
Musarara said this comes as stocks of wheat remaining in the country are made up largely of locally grown wheat, which needs to be blended with the imports to get high quality flour for baking. We are just waiting, there is nothing we can do, but we have transferred to the RTGS equivalent of the forex required. In terms of stocks, it is just local wheat, which cannot be used exclusively without imports for making bread. We use the wheat for blending; normally its 70 percent import and 30 percent local, but still the local wheat should be self-raising
Efforts by The Herald to get a comment from the RBZ governor, John Mangudya, were not successful.
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At US$ 204 per tonne and shipping cost of say $50 per tonne (Price to Japan which is 1.5 times as far as it is to Beira by sea). this gives an FOB Beira price of around $260 per tonne. 30 000 tonnes should cost around US$8 000 000 so where has the 50% of that gone. (Fluctuations in the BDI during 2017 were largely replicated in grain shipping prices, although not with the same violent variability witnessed, for example, in capesize indexes. According to the International Grains Council (IGC), on Dec. 5 the price of shipping one tonne of grain from the U.S. Gulf to the E.U. was $30, up from the 52-week low of $22 recorded earlier in the year, but marginally lower than the 52-week high of $31 recorded in October. At the start of December, the cost of shipping a tonne of grain from the U.S. Gulf to Japan was at a 52-week high of $43. On the Brazil-E.U. route the price was $26, compared to a 52-week low of $22 and a 52-week high of $27.)