Malawi's Burley Tobacco Trading 39% Below State Price

Source from:  Bloomberg 05/08/2009

Burley tobacco in Malawi is trading 39 percent below the mandatory price set by the government, the Tobacco Association of Malawi said. Burley fetched an average price of $1.31 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) last week, compared with the government-mandated price of $2.15, the agency said in a statement handed to reporters on the auction floors of Blantyre yesterday. A total of 30 million kilograms of the leaf has been sold since the market opened six weeks ago, it said, without saying how much had been sold this time last year. Prices have increased since the first two weeks of trading, when the leaf was selling at $1.22 a kilogram, because of improved quality, Tobacco Control Commission General Manager Henderson Chimoyo told a growers' association meeting in the central growing region of Salima on May 5. Malawi, the world's largest producer of burley tobacco, relies on tobacco for 60 percent of its export earnings. Burley tobacco is a lower-grade variety of the leaf used to fill cigarettes flavored with higher-grade flue-cured tobacco. Enditem