2merkato

Stratex International, the AIM-listed gold miner, reported that it had seen promising results from its current drilling programme at the Megenta hot spring epithermal gold prospect, in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

The company said that it had intersected a broad near-surface zone of 43.55 m grading at 0.67 g/t gold at Hole MG-DD-10 and promising grab samples have also been collected from the Akehil prospect about 9 km away from Megenta.

The Ministry of Mines announced Tuesday that it had secured more than 509 million dollars from the mining sector during in the last fiscal year.

The amount was secured from gold, tantalum and gemstone producing companies and traditional miners, Sinknesh Ejjigu, Minister of Mines, said.

It was reported in July that the Ministry of Mines had collected 104 million birr in royalty fees 98 million birr of which was paid by MIDROC Gold.

Allana Potash Corp. announced that it had awarded an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Study (ESIA) on its Ethiopia potash project to Environmental Resources Management (ERM).

The ESIA is scheduled to be completed around August 2012 and will form an integral part of the feasibility study the company is planning to initiate shortly.

ERM has offices in 40 countries around the world and Allana's project will be coordinated out of South Africa.

Having obtained capital injection from the Public Financial Institutions Supervising Agency (PFISA), the bank has decided to set aside budget for residential housing cooperatives to solve its capital shortage. The bank’s request for a 1.5 billion birr capital injection was submitted to the PFISA in 2008.

The latest report by the United States Department of Agriculture puts Ethiopia as the world’s 6th largest coffee producer for the 2010/2011 crop year.

According to the report, Ethiopia has produced about 4,400 bags of coffee (264,000 kg).

The top five coffee producing countries in the list are Brazil (54,500 bags), Vietnam (18,725 bags), Colombia (9,500 bags), Indonesia (9,325 bags) and India (5,100 bags).  

Ethiopia is followed by Honduras (4,000 bags), Peru (4,000 bags), Guatemala (3,910 bags) and Mexico (3,700bags).

Samples from the drill core are being processed for analysis.

Ethiopian Potash Corp announced yesterday that it had completed drilling five holes with total drilling through 1,000 metres to date of the planned 15,000 metre diamond drill programme on its 481km² Danakil Project, in Ethiopia.

The holes were drilled along the western edge of the Danakil and targeted the on strike continuation of the Musley potash deposit. All of the holes intersected the regional Danakil Potash Formation and potash mineralization.

Ethiopia earned over 104.1 million dollars from the export of leather, 73 percent less than its target of 180.4 million dollars for the last fiscal year, the Ethiopian Leather Industry Development Institute (LIDI) said.

The exports revenue came from 43 leather and leather products factories which include 22 tanneries, 15 leather footwear firms, and six leather enterprises, which exported their products to the United States and countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

The government of Ethiopia lifted the price cap on cotton on 15 August 2011 following the decline of prices in the international market.

For three months from November 2010, the price of a kilogramme of cotton was fixed at 42.78 Br a kilo. At the same time, the government had also banned exporting cotton when demand by local textile factories increased and prices in the international market soared.

The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) has commissioned a study to introduce a 200 birr note as the highest legal tender instead of the hitherto 100 birr note.

Considering the inflation in the economy, which surged to 39 percent in July, a currency with 100 birr note as its highest denomination cannot sustain the volume of transaction in the economy, experts say.

The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) said that official receipt of remittance to Ethiopia grew to 1.5 billion dollars in the fiscal year to 8 July 2011, registering an 88 percent increase over its value in the previous year.

In spite of discrepancies for years between World Bank's estimates and that of NBE, the National Bank of Ethiopia for the first time confirmed the receipt of 1.5 billion dollars.

According the central bank's record, 789.5 million dollar was collected from Ethiopian citizens and foreigners based in Ethiopia over the last fiscal year in the form of private transfer.