Monday, October 6, 2025
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Sesame rise continues

The price of sesame seeds continues its hike in April according to reports from the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) indicated. The average price has also increased by a record 35 percent compared with a similar period last year.
According to the monthly report of ECX, in April 19,436 tons of sesame seeds were traded for a total transaction price of 1.03 billion birr, while 70 percent of the volume and 72 percent of the value was secured from the seeds from the product of Hummera/Gonder type.
The report indicated that the product has also reduced by 26 percent and 19 percent of volume and value respectively, the price has been shooting up compared with a performance a month ago.
During the stated period even though the volume and value of the product has been reduced the price has been boosted by 11 percent compared with the trading in March. The seed price in March 2019 has increased by 12.04 percent compared with March 2018.
Comparing with a similar period of April 2018 and this April volume and value of sesame seeds has increased by 81 percent and 140 percent respectively. The figure indicates that both the traded volume and particularly the price registered sharp increase compared with a year ago. The report has also added that the average price of sesame seeds has increased by 35 percent compared with April 2018.
In February the price of sesame seeds has gone up by 12.9 percent compared with the preceding month.
The trend indicates that the increase in April compared with the same period in the preceding year is much higher that the performance of the previous two months.
In the past couple of weeks the price of sesame seeds has gone up daily on the trading floor that is concerning several actors in the sector, who expressed their confusion that the price at the local market escalated with no change on the international market.
On Friday May 3 the trading hit a new record at 7,277 birr per quintal at the floor, while the maximum international price that signed in Ethiopia did not exceed USD 1,700 per ton.
Experts in the sector stated that the total cost of the seeds including FOB Djibouti reach at USD 2,655 that clearly indicate how the trading is managed on huge loss.
On this week the price has shown some decrement compared last week, while it is still the highest compared with international market.
According to the trading information held on May 8 the maximum price of the seeds was 6,643 birr per quintal.
In the past year the trading floor has also traded washed, unwashed and specialty coffee bean for export market besides the local consumption. According to ECX, over 19 thousand ton of unwashed coffee has been traded at the value of one billion birr; the washed bean volume was 1,045 tons, which targets the export market.
There were 19,004 tons of soybeans, and the recently included product that has risen significantly since it came in terms of value and volume, traded on the floor. It has changed by 11 percent and 5.5 percent in volume and value. 3,888 tons of white pea beans has been traded at a cost of 73.6 million birr.

Condo lottery to be held for houses at beginning stage

A new committee is being formed from the management and staff of the housing agency in order to hold the lottery draw for houses in the footing stage.
The new rules which have been formulated by the Ababa Housing Development & Administration Agency will apply to the new condos which are expected to be constructed at the center and the outskirts of Addis Ababa.
This doesn’t mean that the winners will receive the houses at the footing stages rather they will make a committee and follow up the construction of the houses to be completed on time.
Currently, condo houses are transferred in the finishing stages although the construction takes a long time and winners have waited at least a year after the lottery draw.
Sources from the committee told Capital that any contractors working on the construction will be terminated if they don’t complete their work on time.
“The main idea behind holding the lottery draw of the houses at the footing stages is to stretch a better controlling system, if people know where their house is located they will push the contractors to do their job on time and in addition to that the government will have a supervisor which will follow the job. Two follow ups from the government and the owner means the supervision of the house construction will be better.’’
“The new mandatory rule which the committee will apply is, if the contractors fail to complete the house without a tangible reason, the committee will take the project f from them and give it to another contractor.
In other related news, people who got condo houses in the recent condo draw are complaining that some youth are asking them for money when they go to see their houses.
A man who got a condo in Koye Fetche and asked for anonymity told Capital “a group of men came to me when I went to Koye Fetche to see my house, they asked me 500 birr to see it and I gave it to them because I had no option there were no security people.”
Currently near 100,000 condo houses are being built around the disputed Koye Fetche sites and 20,000 houses of 40/60 around Bole Hayat and Bole Arabssa but over 820,000 people still are waiting houses in both schemes.
Recently the administration retook 200 hectares from investors including 54 hectares of the MIDROC fenced land but no plan has been made so far as to which places will be used for condo construction.
So far the government has constructed less than 170,000 houses but more than one million people need houses.

Commission to set national minimum wage

Although some public sector institutions and enterprises have set their own minimum wages, there is no consistent minimum wage in Ethiopia. In response to this situation, the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs drafted a labor proclamation to establish a Commission to set a minimum wage.
The proclamation will not set a minimum wage rather establish a commission that seta a base wage across time depending on the economy, cost of living and other factors in order to avoid the hassle of revising the proclamation repeatedly.
“The draft labor proclamation is believed to solve recurrent issues demanding for salary increment, and other work related issues raised by workers particularly in manufacturing sector, says Kassahun Follo, president of the Confederation of Ethiopian Trade Unions (CETU).
The draft proclamation also holds issues that govern private agencies who work in security and other service providing agencies.
There is a high grievance raised by employees of various agencies that the companies swallow more than70 percent of the money and denied maternal, medical leaves besides violating basic other rights.
Labour Unions cannot play a role in organizing workers or advocating for better pay or conditions particularly in industrial parks even though Ethiopian law, in theory, guarantees freedom of association, However CETU ‘s blames lack of attention paid by the government.
“CETU’s effort to establish labor unions in industrial parks bare no fruit except succeeded to establish a single labor union in Eastern industrial zones,” adds Kassahun.
The government’s eagerness to attract foreign investment led it to promote the lowest base wage in any garment-producing country.
Factories in Ethiopia making clothes for top global brands are paying their workers far less than counterparts in other low-paying countries, according to a report by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released this week.
The new report is based on a visit to the flagship Hawassa Industrial Park that currently employs 25,000 people.
Workers in Industrial parks earn less than 30 USD per month. CETU is therefore advocating with government and employers for any new labor law to include an adequate minimum wage.
In comparison, Chinese garment workers earn USD340 a month, those in Kenya earn USD207 and those in Bangladesh earn USD95.
The proclamation is expected to be ratified by council of ministers in the coming weeks.

Who Buys the “Blood Gold” of Peruvian Andean?

La Rinconada, in the Peruvian Andes, is the home of the world’s highest, chaotic, poisonous and illegal goldmines. La Rinconada is also considered one of the most horrific places on earth: a crime gang-run city, spreading through a valley and up the hills, no running water, no sewerage, no electricity grid.
The illusion to hit it “BIG” by finding the legendary ‘gold rock’ is a passion; it is obsessive. And if and when a miner does find a treasure to keep, he is vulnerable of being robbed, even killed, body discarded – another miner gone missing. Or not. Just disappeared. Maybe in a garbage dump. They are endless in Rinconada. They reflect the character of Rinconada. Refuse, waste, stench and death.
Nobody cares or not enough to investigate the death, the missing. It’s the name of the game. Miners come by their free will. They are not coerced. They enslave themselves, in the vane hope to get rich. Instead, they intoxicate themselves from mercury fumes, from a totally poisonous environment, daily exposure to heavy metals. For many, it’s a dream gone dead. That’s what poverty does; it kills while dreaming of a better world.
In Rinconada, the mafia rules. Police work in connivance. Murders and assassinations are of the order. Prostitution, alcohol and drug abuse is rampant. Nobody cares. It’s survival of the fittest. These criminal organizations are all local, meaning from the vicinity. No foreign mining companies are allowed. They, huge world (in)famous gold and precious metals corporations, are waiting ‘downstream’to buy the blood-ware, without identity, without origins. So that nobody can trace them to the crime.
If this is the case then, who buys the “blood gold” of Peruvian Andean? According to the report, large corporations do. One of them is the Swiss registered Metalor, one of the world’s largest gold foundries. Annually, about 3,000 to 3,500 tons of gold are mined across the globe. Switzerland refines about 70% to 80% of all the gold in the world. An estimated 20% to 30% of it is considered ‘blood gold’ – gold that stems from illicit mining practices, child labor, environmental and social destructions, land theft, corruption – just like from Rinconada.
As of now, Switzerland, the host of the globe’s largest mining corporations and gold foundries does not want to know the origin of the gold – possibly the environmentally and socially most destructive precious metal. Peter Koenig, an economist and geopolitical analyst indicated that Switzerland does not impose a code of ethics on the corporations that enjoy the Swiss tax-haven. The Swiss Government pretends that these mining corporations have their own codes of conduct, and the Swiss authorities trust that they adhere to their own standards of ethics.
Naturally, Switzerland is also the only OECD member that allows her parliamentarians to sit in as many corporate Boards of Directors as they wish. As a matter of fact, this is totally legalized conflict of interest. In this environment of white-collar illicit behavior, corporations like Metalor and Glencore flourish.
According to the report, a recently launched people’s referendum propagating ‘Responsible Mining’, was undermined in the Swiss Parliament by the ‘built-in’ mining lobby. It is common practice that Parliament, as well as the executive give their votum before the public vote on a referendum, another unfair practice, as it influences the voters’ final decision.
In the meantime, the Government of Peru accuses the Swiss foundry Metalor of financing and buying tons of gold from suspicious sources in Peru, meaning illicit gold or ‘blood gold’. Metalor is also investigated for participating in organized crime and money laundering from illicit gold deals on14 March 2019 as “The Metalor Group was the exclusive importer of gold from illegal mining, sold or shipped by Minerales del Sur SRL (Minersur) in the period from 2001 to 2018 in the amount of more than US$ 3.5 billion. Metalor is headquartered in the Canton of Neuchatel, Switzerland.”
Metalor is also being investigated for financing Minersur’s purchasing and sales transactions of gold from illegal sources. One of these illegal sources is La Rinconada. Other illegal sources stem from gold-digging in Peru’s Madre de Dios Amazon Region, where thousands of hectares of rainforest are being raided and devastated by mafia-type organizations, similar to the ones in Rinconada. Metalor denies the accusation, saying they only deal with reputable mining corporations.
What is it about gold that makes it destroy the environment, precious fresh water resources, the human spirit, sowing conflict among entire societies, abolishing their social fabric and bringing death to countless millions for centuries in exploited and abused regions of the globe? As economic analysts indicated, the real industrial value of gold is only about 15% to 20% of its speculative market value. But the gold fever is such that banks invented ‘paper gold’.
Anybody can buy gold without ever seeing the gold bar. The bank simply issues a certificate, an IOU for a certain amount of gold which, in theory, could be exchanged for the real thing at any time Madame or Mister Anybody would like to keep her/his gold bar in their personal household vault. Not so easy. As the Financial Times recently reported, there is more than 100 times more paper gold floating around than real gold is available on the market. If everybody would like to exchange their paper gold into real gold, the banking system would collapse, or would just simply fail to deliver.
Case in point was Germany. By tradition Germany had about 1,200 tons of gold, worth about US$ 50 billion, deposited in the FED in New York. In 2013, when the Germans awareness that their gold is being stored outside of German borders resulted in a public outcry, the Bundesbank wanted to withdraw and repatriate all of their foreign stored gold by 2020, but the FED said no, they could not deliver. The gold was simply not available.
Blood and crime are intimately linked to gold, it seems. The western monetary system was for a long time backed by gold. Professor Dan Rothental of London School of Economics asserted that today, western moneys are fiat money, not even backed by gold, just hot air. But the Russian Ruble and the Chinese yuan are backed by gold, as well as by their respective economies.
Back to La Rinconada, Metalor and Switzerland, home of more than two thirds of the world’s gold refining, how much of the reserve gold in the coffers of countries around the world is “blood gold”? How many people, children and eventually entire generations have to live in misery, their health degenerating from exposure to heavy metals and eventually leading to early and painful death, until human consciousness is able to stop the gold craze? Closing down hellholes like Rinconada and Madre de Dios mafia-run, all-destructive gold mines? And hundreds more of similarly devastating types mines around the world. Perhaps when the value of gold becomes what it ought to be, its industrial value, and nothing more and nothing less, humanity becomes richer by the values of human decency and respect for each other.