MUTHARIKA TO TOBACCO BUYERS: "CALL ME A DICTATOR"

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 LILONGWE 000275 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS STATE FOR AF/S DAN MOZENA, LOIS CECSARINI, GABRIELLE MALLORY STATE FOR EB/IFD/ODF LINDA SPECHT AND ELAINE JONES TREASURY FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS/AFRICA/BEN CUSHMAN STATE PLEASE PASS TO MCC FOR KEVIN SABA PARIS FOR D'ELIA NAIROBI FOR FAS KEVIN SMITH E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: ECON EAGR SUBJECT: MUTHARIKA TO TOBACCO BUYERS: "CALL ME A DICTATOR" REF: 2005 LILONGWE 696 LILONGWE 00000275 001.2 OF 002 -------------- SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (SBU) President Bingu wa Mutharika opened the state-controlled tobacco auctions today with fiery populist rhetoric, accusing American buyers of collusion and telling them they must pay higher prices or "pack up and go." He announced that the GOM is establishing a minimum price for "strategic" agricultural commodities, including tobacco, cotton, and tea. The proposed minimum price for tobacco is well above market rates, driving speculation that the GOM will have to retreat from its position to ensure the crop is sold. While most of Mutharika's talk about price floors and government intervention is probably bluster, he may disrupt the market enough to interrupt desperately needed export earnings. End summary. ¶2. (SBU) According to exporters, the GOM is once again trying to impose a price floor on tobacco in the midst of rising production costs and declining world prices. Since the mid-1990's, tobacco growing in Malawi has shifted from the exclusive domain of a few large estates to Malawi's most widely grown cash crop, with some 500,000 smallholders demanding subsidized inputs and guaranteed prices. That shift has made tobacco prices the locus of highly charged politics, with frequent demonstrations and stoppages. Along with the politics have come increasingly unreasonable demands, which the government has responded to by blaming and threatening the exporters who buy the leaf at auction and export to international cigarette makers. (Two of the three exporters are controlled by American tobacco companies Universal Leaf and Alliance One.) -------------- "YOU SHOULD PACK AND GO" -------------- ¶3. (U) At today's ceremony opening the auction floor for the season, Mutharika lambasted the exporters in front of a cheering crowd of growers, saying that he knows tobacco farmers who cannot afford "a bicycle, a house, or even food, because they have been cheated at this floor." Buyers have been accepted as guests in Malawi, he said, "only to cheat our people" with prices they have conspired to keep artificially low. "If buyers are not prepared to be fair," said Mutharika, "they should pack up and go...We can sell the tobacco ourselves; don't dare to threaten me...If someone calls me a dictator, so be it." At each of his most pointed remarks, Mutharika directed his gaze directly at the Charge and emboffs. ¶4. (SBU) Along with the rhetoric were specifics about minimum prices. Mutharika declared that the GOM was henceforth considering tobacco, cotton, and tea to be "national strategic commodities," which would have minimum price floors. For tobacco, the range of prices will depend on grade, with $1.10/kg for the lowest grade of green (i.e., unprocessed, field-dried leaf) and $1.70/kg for the highest grade. After the event, tobacco exporters and growers characterized the low-grade price as completely unworkable. Last year's average for all grades was $0.99/kg; at the minimum prices dictated today, the average would be in the neighborhood of $1.28/kg. When econoff asked one of the largest growers whether anyone would buy the low-grade leaf, he declared, "No one knows; it's chaos!" Both main exporters expressed similar confusion; one has told us he could sell against blue-chip contracts (forward-buying arrangements from the largest cigarette producers) at these prices, but buying inventory on speculation would probably be impossible. ¶5. (SBU) Mutharika's ire has been sharpened by a November 2004 World Bank-funded report that has recently resurfaced, alleging that the tobacco exporters "probably" collude on LILONGWE 00000275 002.2 OF 002 prices paid at auction. The report bases this allegation on a statistical analysis of prices paid, which shows a close correlation between the American buyers. The report recommends further investigation by a then yet-to-be-formed Competition Commission. Mutharika has extrapolated this and other vague rumors of price collusion into a firm conviction, shared by many Malawians, that the American companies routinely collude on prices. -------------- GOVERNMENT TO THE RESCUE--YIKES! -------------- ¶6. (SBU) As threats intensify, the exporters are beginning to wonder what, if any, arrows the GOM really has in its quiver, apart from more blustering. One hopes the threat of throwing the parastatal ADMARC into the tobacco buying business is empty: the company has neither the capacity for processing tobacco nor the considerable expertise needed to offer product that the market will buy. It is plain to nearly everyone--though perhaps not to the government--that doing so at the grower prices the GOM is insisting on is probably impossible. Still, sources in the industry tell us that the parastatal Auction Holdings Ltd. has set up an export subsidiary. Whether this is to introduce more competition into the marketplace or to provide a contingency for an ADMARC is unclear; in any case, the new company has failed to find commercial financing for operations. -------------- COMMENT: EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL -------------- ¶7. (SBU) Today's rabble-rousing rhetoric and the past week's tough private meetings between government and exporters is probably a negotiating tactic, but it may paint the government into a political corner by stoking the hopes for higher prices and scapegoating exporters. The nightmare scenario would be for Mutharika to somehow force the price floor by bringing ADMARC into the picture to mop up the overpriced low-grade tobacco. While it is hard to say how the exporters would react (assuming the GOM could find a way to finance an intervention),such a move could disrupt the market and thus the foreign currency flows on which Malawi depends. With about 1.5 months of forex reserves, a huge backlog of import payments, and the IMF insisting on a looser forex policy, there is little room for error. ¶8. (SBU) More worrying in the long run is the possibility that Mutharika actually believes the central-planning economic perspective he exhibits in his public remarks. His government has often intervened in markets, particularly agricultural markets, with the apparent idea that there is a "right" price for commodities. Generally, the "right" price happens to coincide with political expediency: maize and fertilizer for import should be cheaper, but tobacco for export should be more expensive. In an agricultural economy that has been optimized for subsidized subsistence farming, the need for structural reform presses more urgently with every season, and the governments attempts to avoid painful reform take it further and further from market liberalization. Quite apart from his populist rhetoric, his actions suggest that state control is the only tool he really knows how to grasp. GILMOUR