This Friday (17) in your ANBA Bulletin: The United Arab Emirates were one of the most-growing importers of coffee from Brazil last year. Almost 140,000 60-kg bags were shipped to that country, up 22% from 2018, the Brazilian Coffee Exporters Council (Cecafé) reported. To the Arab world as a whole, 1.78 million bags were exported, up 5% year on year. Given this scenario, Cecafé decided to participate for the first time in Gulfood, the food and beverage fair to take place in Dubai, UAE, from February 16-20, which will feature the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil) and around one hundred companies and sector-specific entities from Brazil. “[The Arabs] are great partners. We can provide a high-quality coffee they greatly appreciate,” Cecafé chairman Nelson Carvalhaes told our reporter Bruna Garcia.

And Brazilian children’s footwear brand Kidy has developed a new line to widen their foreign sales, Kidy International, showcased earlier this week at Couromoda fair in São Paulo. The Middle East is now the second largest destination of the company’s products and it’s betting on the Arab market to succeed in its expansion project. “The Middle East is now the most important of my work relations. Because this project must achieve and secure a market share there. And they have a large demand,” the brand’s exports manager Rodrigo Nunes told our reporter Thais Sousa.

Check also the new phase of the Brazilian-led archeological mission that explores the Theban tomb 123 in Luxor, Egypt. A well was unearthed inside the tomb and probably leads to a funeral chamber with several materials. “Our focus this year was digging into the so-called Statue Room. It’s the innermost point inside the tomb and held the statues of the tomb’s owner, Amenemhat, and his wife Enuit. As we started cleaning that room, we discovered a large well and started digging it until we found a new chamber under it; now we have a well dug into the stone at the Statue Room floor. It’s approximately 1.5 meter deep and we found a room dug into the rock that may have held Amenemhat’s sarcophagus,” said José Roberto Pellini, a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).