An American trader says if he was a Canadian farmer contemplating what type of chickpea to plant this spring, he’d lean more toward desis than kabulis.
Kabulis fetched the lucrative prices in 2000-01, but demand from India could boost the value of desi-type chickpeas in the coming crop year.
“There are rumors that India may be as short as much as two million tonnes of chickpeas. A lot of that would be these desi chickpeas,” said Paul Lambert in an interview this week.
The California trader was a featured speaker at Pulse Days 2001 in Saskatoon earlier this year.
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“With the shortfall in India as probably reality, you might want to plant more desis.”
Canada’s North American partners — Mexico and the United States — grow few desis, which is another reason to seed that type of chickpea.
Back in the beginning of January, Lambert told the 1,700 producers who attended Crop Production Week in Saskatoon that they should look at Mexico for the first hints about where chickpea prices would go in 2001. Mexico harvests its crop in February and March and that sets the tone for international quality and values.
Last year the demand for the Mexican crop was voracious and it drove the price of kabulis sky-high. Canadian farmers reaped the rewards of those strong prices.
Lambert said it looks like Mexico will harvest another large, good quality crop this year. Demand for the new crop is strong, but not at the level it was last year.
He estimates that 40,000 tonnes of the new Mexican chickpea crop have already been sold. Initial prices were $50 to $70 per tonne higher than the same time last year, but prices have dropped in recent weeks.
While Mexican growers seem eager to sell, Canadian growers appear to be waiting for better prices.
“The growers are holding tight,” said Lambert. “They’ll either get their price for their Canadian chickpeas or they’ll use it for seed to plant.”
The new crop of Mexican 12 millimetre chickpeas f.o.b. Mazatlan is selling for the same price as Canadian nine mm chickpeas on the track in Montreal.
“If I was a buyer in the Middle East, I would buy the Mexican product. It’s a larger size and it’s probably better quality,” said Lambert whose company, PL International, is based in Tiburon, California.
Not only are the Mexican chickpeas a better bargain, they are easier to locate.
“If a buyer came in for a couple thousand tonnes of Canadian product it would be hard to find. If they came in for a couple thousand tonnes of Mexican product I could find it very easily,” said Lambert.
He said Mexico will likely produce about 150,000 to 160,000 tonnes of exportable crop, about the same amount as last year. The United States is expected to have a slightly larger chickpea crop than last year.
Estimates of 2001 Canadian chickpea plantings range from 700,000 to 1.3 million acres. A survey of growers at Crop Production Week showed they intend to seed 808,000 acres.
Officials with Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, the group that conducted the January survey, said informal polling of those who attended a recent series of pulse workshops indicates plantings will be much larger than 808,000 acres.
Whatever the number, it will undoubtedly be bigger than the 700,000 acres seeded in 2000, said Lambert. That will push down chickpea prices.
The wild card is the size of the Turkish crop. A big one will mean trouble.
“If all those crops came in, you would definitely have an oversupply,” he said.
