Markets

Pulse Update: Chickpeas chug out of southern ports

Liz Wells January 22, 2025

Australia’s chickpea crop has been shipped in bulk from the additional ports of Port Kembla and Melbourne to supplement capacity from the regular ports of Newcastle in NSW, and Brisbane, Gladstone and Mackay in Qld. Photo: GRDC

EARLY shipment of Australian chickpeas, faba beans, and lentils is well advanced, as buoyant export demand and good quality enables a string of cargoes to set sail for South Asian and Middle East markets.

Shipping figures and stems indicate more than 1 million tonnes (Mt) of the 1.9Mt chickpea crop , as forecast by ABARES, will have been exported from October to January, the first third of the marketing year.

Around 300,000t of current-crop lentils will have been shipped by the end of this month out of a total crop seen by ABARES at 1.1Mt crop.

On faba beans, roughly half the crop seen at around 700,000t will have left Australia’s shores by the end of March.

Demand for shipping slots has seen a combination cargo of chickpeas and lentils load this month at Louis Dreyfus Company’s Emerald terminal in Melbourne in an unprecedented move for the facility which has a long history of shipping wheat, barley, and canola.

After first filling a hatch or two with chickpeas in Brisbane, the Sri Lanka-bound vessel this week topped up with chickpeas at Qube’s Quattro facility, again believed to be a first for Port Kembla, south of Sydney.

All prices quoted are in Australian dollars per tonne unless stated otherwise.

Chickpeas

Prices for chickpeas delivered Brisbane have dropped from $930 per tonne in mid-December to $890-$920/t as traders accumulate the last few vessels scheduled to arrive in India ahead of the expected end on March 31 to its tariff-free period.

Some are speculating it will be extended, and the Indian Government’s announcement yesterday that the tariff-free period for pigeon peas has been pushed out by 12 months to 31 March 2026 is seen by some as a positive sign.

If India’s tariff on chickpeas does return in April, bulk demand will rely on Bangladesh and Pakistan, supported by containerised sales, primarily to Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.

Traders said growers have prioritised the selling and out-turn of chickpeas over wheat and barley in Queensland and central and northern New South Wales.

“There are not a lot of unsold chickpeas waiting to come to market; there might be a few guys with off-spec ones still to come in,” Robinson Grain Toowoomba-based trader Anthony Furse said.

Rain caught some of NSW’s later chickpeas crops, but as a proportion of the national crop, downgraded tonnage is thought to be only 10 percent of the total.

Growers of chickpeas are now shifting their focus to selling sorghum, harvest of which has started in northern NSW and southern Qld.

Recent weeks have seen a record 10 eastern Australian terminals load chickpeas, spread from GrainCorp’s Mackay in the north to LDC’s Melbourne in the south.

Sources say Port Kembla and Melbourne have never before loaded bulk chickpeas, and the move indicates space on the stems made by modest demand for wheat cargoes in December-January, and the urgency created by India’s tariff-free window.

Faba beans

Faba beans delivered port are trading at around $630/t, unchanged from last month, with the market bouncing around that figure based on spot demand for cargoes still loading for Egypt.

While the southern harvest was a modest one based on relatively dry conditions at planting and during the growing season, the crop in central and northern NSW, and southern Qld, made up for it.

Shipping stems indicate cargoes are going out of Adelaide, Geelong, and Brisbane in coming weeks.

“There has been good upfront buying pace from Egypt,” Agri-oz Exports managing director Francois Darcas said.

Fabas, lentils and chickpeas are all seeing a larger-than-normal proportion of exports go in bulk rather than containers.

“The much cheaper bulk freight versus container freight, and the availability of mobile bulk shippers, is reducing the container volume.”

Lentils

Lentil prices are unchanged from mid-December, and still trading at around $870/t delivered Wimmera packer for Nipper types.

Larger Jumbo types are trading at around $940/t, up $20/t from last month.

ETG Australia pulse trader Todd Krahe said grower selling fell away around Christmas, and has just started to pick up as growers return from their post-harvest holidays.

“We’re just starting to see samples coming in now, and a little bit of grower selling,” Mr Krahe said.

South Australia’s harsh season greatly reduced the size of its lentil crop in the Murray-Mallee, and Port Adelaide zone generally.

However, Yorke and Eyre peninsulas produced reasonable crops, with larger area offsetting below-average yields overall to reflect limited in-crop rain on most SA farms.

Mr Krahe said quality overall from the crop harvested in Vic has been good, although frost affected some Mallee crops, and rain caught some Wimmera ones.

“I’d say 80pc have gone number 1 grade, and only those…. that got late rain on them have been downgraded,” he said of the Wimmera lentil harvest.

Mr Krahe said off-spec lentils were likely to be exported in containers to India and/or Sri Lanka, but could go into bulk holds if enough volume comes forward.

South Asian markets are receiving Australian and Canadian cargoes, as well as harvesting the local kharif crop, and demand for Australian lentils remains solid.

Traders say around one third of the crop has gone to export, and the rest remains on farm with the grower.

It is likely to be sold on spikes in the market, possibly created by drops in the Australian dollar as world currency markets ingest the impact of new administration in the US.

 

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