What's Happened Over The Weekend

Everybody's least favourite uncle, Egypt, the one that kisses your Mum and sister just a little too enthusiastically at Christmas, New Year, birthdays and any other opportunity it can get has bought 240,000 MT of French wheat.

Paying around USD280/tonne for it equates to almost USD30/tonne more than they bought Russian wheat at just last Wednesday. Of course Russian wheat could be 50p/tonne, but that isn't much use if you can't actually get it.

The Gyppo's went on to say that they won't be buying any more wheat from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia until those countries export position becomes clearer.

Squirming as uncomfortably as your Mum when Uncle Nomani eyes her up across the lounge, Egypt says that it now wants to reschedule more than half a million tonnes of cheap Russian wheat it now isn't going to get. Having to buy it in again is going to cost "between 2.5 and 4.5 billion Egyptian pounds" in 2010/11 it says, a significant sum that it would rather like to recoup back.

SovEcon dropped their estimate of this year's Russian wheat crop to 43-44 MMT. Meanwhile there's a bottleneck developing as the export deadline approaches.

Bangladesh say that they've got 400,000 MT of wheat on contract from the Black Sea but now only expect 100,000 MT of that to be delivered, certainly 120,000 of Ukraine wheat has been cancelled over the weekend.

Kazakhstan says that it isn't going to ban wheat exports, although it indicated in a roundabout way that if asked Russia would get preference over any other potential buyer.