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Ideal rental for small family

THIS one-storey, 1225 square-foot house in Tarmwe township is ideal for a small family. Located a convenient 20 minutes from downtown in Nat Chaung Street, off Kyaikkansan Road, it also has a compound of 4800 square feet, a rare size for the location, and well worth the K200,000 monthly rental. more

Yangon Weather Forecast, Burma

India dumps Myanmar pulses deal

NEW DELHI – The Indian government may have to import pulses through small tenders after it officially scrapped plans to procure 750,000 tonnes of pulses from Myanmar.

The plan, approved by a so-called empowered group of ministers in late 2009, was meant to urgently ease domestic retail prices for dals, which had soared to a high of 100 rupees per kilogram (US$2.20 per kilo).

Government-to-government commodity purchases work out much cheaper than other routes but Myanmar was ready to sell more pulses to India than the amount India initially wanted.

The deal being discussed was over import of urad (black matpe), moong (green mung beans) and tur (toor or pigeon peas) at reasonable rates.

However, the Myanmar government had insisted on an advance non-US dollar cash payment of over Rs2 billion (about US$44 million) for the imports.

The Indian government was keen on using the balance of trade route, instead.

The urgency over clinching the government-to-government pulses import deal with Myanmar was higher after a recent meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Prices.

Following the meeting, Food and Farm Minister Sharad Pawar committed that the government would encourage pulses imports expeditiously from anywhere in the world.

However, relying on private sector imports alone would have meant not only importing in small quantities compared to the big buys that could be made through a government-to-government agreement, but also being highly vulnerable to a significant jump in global prices for pulses.

The commodity is traded very minimally in the world market compared to grains such as wheat, meaning prices can fluctuate rapidly in response to supply or demand changes.

India is not only the world’s largest consumer and importer of pulses, but domestic demand for pulses outstrips production of around 15 million tonnes yearly by around 3 million tonnes.

Myanmar produces 2.7 million tonnes of pulses annually while the domestic consumption is only 500,000 tonnes, making it an ideal exporter to a pulses-thirsty India, even at a relatively shorter notice than if they were imported from, say, Canada, Australia, Tanzania or the USA.

Moreover, Myanmar’s pulses do not trade prominently or regularly in the global market, leaving them comparatively impervious to sudden sentiment-driven hikes and dips in prices.

– Economic Times of India

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