Australia has emerged as a bona fide lentil exporter.
Exports from Down Under had been nothing but a blip on lentil sales charts, but in the first nine months of the 1999-2000 crop year, they became a line.
Between October 1999 and June 2000, Australian exporters sold 91,202 tonnes of lentils. That compares to the previous high of 7,731 tonnes in the 1998-1999 crop year.
No worries, mate. The competition from Australia is closer to a swat from a wallaby than a knockout punch from a kangaroo.
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“We’re not being excluded or kicked out of markets because of Australia. We’re just forced to compete with it on a price basis,” said Gerald Donkersgoed, special crops exporter with Finora Canada Ltd.
He said exports of Canadian lentils have been brisk and demand is steady due to drought in the Middle East, a prime lentil growing area.
“The demand base is large enough that both Canada and Australia can enjoy that import market over there.”
Special crops analyst Brian Clancey said Canada can also thank Turkey. The Asian country has gone from being a major exporter of lentils to a net importer.
Turkey has a new irrigation program that is converting the best lentil producing land into fruit and vegetable production.
“That has fundamentally changed everything so there’s not only room for terrific expansion in Canadian production, there’s room for someone else to come in and try to do something,” said Clancey, editor of STAT, a special crops newsletter.
Donkersgoed said the Australians produce and export red lentils. Canadians primarily grow green lentils, but reds are becoming more popular here as well.
“We’re told that the Australian red lentil is a more efficient splitting lentil than the Canadian red lentil,” said Donkersgoed.
That means Australian reds yield more finished product than Canadian reds, forcing Canadian exporters to undercut the Australians in markets where the two compete. Price undercutting is easier to accomplish in the European and Middle Eastern markets where Canada has a freight advantage, but the Australians have a leg up in India and Pakistan.
Canada also has a good reputation for quality, said Donkersgoed. Producers and processors have become proficient at delivering uniform, clean product, which impresses buyers who are used to dealing with substandard Turkish lentils.
Australia has been trying to become a lentil exporter since 1997, when farmers there seeded 141,000 acres of the pulse crop, but severe droughts have kept production below 50,000 tonnes.
Last year, producers seeded 141,000 acres and finally got a good crop, which yielded 103,000 tonnes. Producers seeded 274,000 acres for the 2000-2001 crop year and forecasters are predicting a 141,000-tonne crop.
To put the Australian lentil industry in perspective, Canadian producers planted 817,000 tonnes of lentils in 1997 and seeded over 1.8 million acres this spring, a jump of one million acres. Production is forecast at 985,000 tonnes.
Clancey said Canada exported 437,000 tonnes of lentils between August 1999 and June 2000, more than four times what the Australians exported during that same period.
“I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Canada is the market leader and we set the price tone in markets,” he said.
Transportation is the issue that concerns him.
“The bigger challenges have less to do with finding markets than actually getting the bloody stuff out of the country.”
