We caught up with Lincoln Moore, Executive Director at AIM-listed Dekel (DKL) Agri-Vision based in Cote d'Ivoire. "Our focus is to be at the logistics and production end of the supply chain with our commodities," explained Lincoln.
"95% of our palm oil comes from smallholders and we work very much in collaboration with our small farmers. And we are looking to expand this business model out for cashew nuts for our new mill, which will be sourced 100% from smallholders, albeit in a different part of Cote d'Ivoire".
"We are also looking at a third commodity and have done an internal feasibility, although we haven't yet said publicly what this is going to be. Growth will come from developing products from the waste materials of each of the projects, and a clean energy project combining biomass and solar. Those are the projects in our minds at the moment."
On Friday DKL published half year production numbers which were the strongest yet. "As we entered 2020 prices were looking to spike and then of course Covid started. It did have a negative impact on crude palm oil prices during the lockdown last year, March, April, May, June. Now focus has come back on the fact that physical palm oil is in very short supply indeed, and we have just achieved our highest prices over a six month period - and at the momenet they are still sitting at a very very high level."
"We have been producing just under 40,000 tonnes of crude palm oil through our palm oil plant and we are working to increase the throughput as quickly as possible. We are working closely with the farmers to grow more and increase the throughput as quickly as possible. We have a significant nursery infrastructure where we sell 5,000 plants or 3/4,000 hectares equivalent every year. We've been doing that for 8 years now, and it takes 6 years to see a reasonable yield, 10 years peak yield, so we are hoping to see greater yields in years to come."
"All our product goes into the food market locally and appears in branded versions in the local supermarkets. There's competition for our fruit and we hope our mill has the strongest relationships with the farmers" said Lincoln.
Dekel Agri (DKL)