Introduction

December 2022:

During the QA of the French dashboard results, we found an issue in the merging code of the synaxomec data with the SEI-PCS results and corrected the synacomex files (1 trade in particular).

September 2022:

Following a meeting with the French Ministry, we decided to look further into the trades that did not match the BoL. It turns out that these non-matches are due to country of import being “France” rather than something else. We therefore expanded the filtration to include all countries and then plan to highlight these differences in the SNDI platform.

July 2022:

The French Ministry has received permission from Synacomex to share the import data with Trase in order to match the import information with Trase’s Bills of Lading (BoL) in an attempt to:

  1. provide import volumes of soy into France that is more in line with industry reports
  2. provide a mean to unmask importer names on the front end.

This revised report reviews previous data and then does a matching exercise with the finalized Synacomex data (ahead of matching with the SEI-PCS v.2.6. results).

February 2022:

Following discussion with the French Ministry, the French National Union for Foreign Commerce Synacomex has replied to the publication of the Ministry’s website using Trase data ( www.deforestationimportee.fr) claiming that the information does not correctly represent the soy import market for France, e.g.:

In a first step, we have decided to address this first observation by investigating the differences between customs declarations (CDs) and Bills of Lading (BoL). For the 2004-2018 period, the Brazilian soy Trase data published on the Ministry’s website (SEI-PCS v.2.5.2 in Jan 2022) uses exclusively CDs. Going forward, new Trase years for Brazilian soy will be based on BoL for which we expect better representation of the physical importers.

In a second step, we obtained import data from the companies in Synacomex (Bunge, Cargill, Cofco, Solteam, Louis Dreyfus) for 2020 and attempt to match their entries with those of the 2020 BoL for soy.

Question: What are the differences between customs declarations and bills of lading?

Customs Declarations are forms that are typically filed when exporting a product and provides information on the final country of destination. This information is gathered and maintained by governments (exporting and importing governments) and is typically the basis of export and import data (e.g. through Comtrade).

Bills of Lading are documents that are issued by carriers that accompany cargo shipments. This information is gathered by many sea captains delivering the goods across ports.

Main differences between the two documents are, e.g.:

  • CDs are focused on the final country of destination (e.g. Switzerland, even though it does not have any international port), while BoL will only record movements of shipments between 2 ports (goods can still travel after that). For instance, a BoL with a final destination being “the Netherlands” is not very reliable given that the country is a major trade hub for Europe (goods can still travel by truck from there). This example needs to be differentiated from what we have been calling “re-export” in Trase (either as transformed products, or a new shipment with new CDs).
  • CDs used in Trase are issued by the producing country and therefore the information on the actors are more reliable on the exporter than the importer side. The Importer on the BoL represents the physical importer, or the company receiving the goods on the other end. CDs of importing countries (e.g. issued by the French government) might be able to make the bridge between the CD and BoL information (especially the BoL as the CDs will be able to confirm what arrived and stayed in France).
  • Some information, such as exporter CNPJ in Brazil, is less reliable, since not a required piece of information for the export (unlike the CDs which is linked to payment of duty)

Objective

This document presents the trade data for Brazilian soy going to France by observing:

  1. Differences between CDs and BoL in 2017
  2. Expected volumes and actors in 2019 and 2020 from latest acquired BoL
  3. Match volumes between Synacomex data and 2020 BoL

Note: this analysis is done without applying an equivalence factor at this stage to avoid confusion in communication with the French Ministry and Synacomex partners.

Comparing 2017 CDs and BoL for exports of Brazilian soy to France

We start by looking at the differences between the CD (currently being used in Trase for Brazilian soy in 2017) and the BoL. The table below shows the main differences between actors labeled as “importers” in the trade data and the volumes of soy associated with their imports.

Total exports of soy products to France in 2017 were reported as:

Differences with COMTRADE can be due to duplicates in the CDs that cannot be removed or because product actually ends up in a country other than France (BoL).

There are more importers listed in the CDs than in the BoL which also has an “UNKNOWN CUSTOMER” which could be hiding the additional actors. Using the BoL alone in 2017 would make key importers “disappear” from the list such as CARGILL and LOUIS DREYFUS. Other such as SOLTEAM SAS (which has come up in discussions with importers) currently doesn’t not appear in the CDs but would show up on the list with the BoL.

Looking at BoL for 2019 and 2020

Going forward, we will be using BoL for 2019, 2020 and 2021 Trase data for Brazilian soy. We repeat the same analysis as above to highlight the importers involved with soy imports into France in those years.

Total exports of soy products to France are:

Volumes are close to official numbers from COMTRADE. In 2020, the BoL continues to show a large amount of “UNKNOWN CUSTOMER” meaning that we are still without an ability to identify the entire import market for France.

Next steps in the context of engagement with the French Ministry

We were able to obtain import data that was shared by Synacomex. The goal is to math their information with the BoL that contain vessel numbers (match by vessel numbers). The file contains the following coding:

Synacomex reports a total of 4533503.605 tonnes of soy for 2020. Synacomex reports a total of 2004884.409 tonnes of soy for 2019.

In 2020

The total imports of soy into France from the BoL was 1849991.064 tonnes of which a total of 1623943.855 tonnes can be matched or about 96%.

Here is the breakdown of the matching

There is some additional volume in BoL for which we cannot find a match in Synacomex, as seen below:

In 2019

The total imports of soy into France from the BoL was 2231617.681 tonnes of which a total of 1964117.766 tonnes can be matched or about 96%.

Here is the breakdown of the matching

There is some additional volume in BoL for which we cannot find a match in Synacomex, as seen below:

Which means that we will have still more volume than expected in the final results.

The matching between the BOL file and the Synacomex information has to happen by several columns:

  • Exporter (from BoL)
  • Importer (from BoL)
  • volume (from BoL)
  • IMO number

The reason for these matches is that in some cases there can be the same Exporter-Importer-IMO but a different volume assigned (especially if there are 1-to-many matches).