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El Salvador’s coffee production is expected to reach 639,000 sixty-kg bags in marketing year (MY) 2021/22. The Salvadoran coffee sector continues to struggle mainly due to low international prices, climate change, continued coffee leaf rust, and a lack of a long-term strategy that has hindered investment at the farm level. The MY2022/23 crop is forecast to slightly decrease to 619,000 sixty-kg bags.

Improving international prices have eased the financial pressure exerted by the COVID-19 pandemic on the sugar sector, but inflationary concerns have led the government to include sugar among the products with import duties reduced to zero percent for a one-year period.

Wheat production in Ethiopia for 2022/23 projected at a record level of 5.7 million MT while corn forecasted to 10.2 million MT. The Government of Ethiopia (GOE) has identified top priorities that can increase production and productivity of cereals through small and large-scale irrigation development, financing agricultural inputs, encouraging cluster farming, and reducing post-harvest loss.

El Salvador’s food manufacturing sector has kept a fast pace in terms of increasing production levels. Food manufacturers took the challenging environment caused by the pandemic as an opportunity to evolve and add new items to their food lines.

On April 8, 2022, the Government of Ethiopia (GOE) passed a directive allowing franco-valuta imports of essential food commodities without foreign exchange permits.

This report provides initial analysis and a courtesy translation of El Salvador’s Transitory Law to Combat Price Inflation in Basic Products, published March 11, 2022, with an import duties comparison added for reference.

Ethiopia’s inflation rate remains persistently high, reaching 33.6 percent in February 2022. The headline inflation in February 2022 is lower than the 34.5 percent recorded in January 2022.

The Ethiopian Sugar Corporation (ESC) and the Ethiopian Industrial Input Development Enterprise (EIIDE) have separately issued international competitive tenders to purchase 200,000 metric tons (MT) of white cane sugar and 10,000 MT of lint cotton, respectively.

Despite the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salvadorans have increased purchases of specialty food products and continue seeking new flavors and increased variety, demonstrated by the opening of new specialty food stores and new registrations of U.S. products during these unprecedented times.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, FAS El Salvador identified an opportunity to seek market access for U.S. table-eggs. In February 2021, FAS obtained the equivalence needed to allow imports of fresh table-eggs from the United States, and the first shipment arrived in El Salvador on October 20th, 2021.

During 2020, El Salvador imported a little over $632 million of agricultural products, which is a drop of 8 percent compared to 2019.

In El Salvador, there is no legal impediment to the use of biotechnology for food, feed, and processing. However, no GE crops are currently cultivated.