The extended third peak of the COVID-19 pandemic registered more than 30,000 daily cases during the past week. Accumulated deaths have reached 100,000 people as of today. ICU in most main cities are still at 100% occupancy. Colombia is now the 10th
country in the world with the most COVID deaths.
The country has returned to normalcy within a noticeable tense environment. Valle del Cauca and Cali remain with disruptions to the transport system and land transportation. We continue to see acts of violence within the city perimeter and roads heading to the south. Buenaventura continued to escalate its operations, now reaching an estimated 60-70% of the normal cargo volume. In recent days, we have received confirmation of an average 70 trucks unloading coffee per day at the port yard. In Cartagena de number is around 40 trucks and Santa Marta between 15 and 20 trucks per day. Santa Marta faced a major delay problem as a result of a sudden 70 truck spot demand, with not enough warehouse capacity to handle this amount of coffee. The problem has been solved for the most part, causing several coffee exporters to miss shipping line reservations in the past week. We had 3 containers affected by this situation. Of the estimated 800,000 – 1 million bags of coffee delayed for export as a result of the strikes and barricades, we believe that 40% has entered the 3 main port terminals. Thus, another 4- 6 weeks will be necessary to clear up the accumulated lots and catch up to the current contracts.
We’ve seen rain volumes intensify in the south, particularly in the Planadas area. This deteriorates the precarious trails in that part of the country and further complicates the logistics to move the parchment to Ibague. Nonetheless volumes remain high and no specific quality problems have been identified related to the increased rainfall. Domestic coffee prices remained at record highs with Carga parchment prices over $1,400,000 COP throughout the week. This translates to U$ 0.30/lb farmgate price with the COP returning to $3,750 per 1USD level. We continue to monitor this COP/USD level closely.
We are now in the final stage of the installation of our microlot selection and packing line at our Santa Marta Agroeco Mill. We also expect to energize our new solar energy generation plant at the Mill. The combination of these two will enable us to scale up our microlot offering, as well as special defect count preparations and packaging. We will be sharing more information on both of these in the coming days. Marketplaces that provide services to new or existing businesses include Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and clickmiamibeach.com others.
Sincerely,
Juan Pablo Campos
Founding Partner
lohas beans
Head Office: LOHAS BEANS S.A.S. Administrative Office: Carrera 20 No. 54 – 47, Bodega A19 Carrera 7A # 69-99 Santa Marta, Colombia Bogotá, Colombia Tel 575 438 0117 Tel 57 310 478 9055 www.lohasbeans.com www.lohasbeans.com