Early Call On Chicago

30/11/10 -- The overnight grains closed narrowly mixed with beans and corn generally 1-2c lower and wheat either side of unchanged.

The US dollar is firmer on risk aversion and crude oil is almost a dollar a barrel easier.

Not a huge amount of fresh news, the US winter wheat crop neither declined nor improved as far as crop conditions were concerned last night, remaining at 47% good/excellent. Historically that is pretty low.

China announced that it is re-exporting the 54,000 of US corn impounded for containing non-authorised GM strains back in September. COFCO say that this season's bumper corn crop will keep Chinese corn imports to a minimum in 2011, not what the trade had been expecting.

Soybean imports however will increase by 1-3 MMT next year to 55-57 MMT, they say.

Northern Argentina and southern Brazil still have dryness issues. Heavy rains in eastern Australia look like damaging wheat quality there, whilst the the harvest in WA is around two thirds complete.

The USDA have just announced the sale of 165,000 MT of soybeans to "unknown".

It is of course month-end so there could be some book-squaring going on today. For the month of November as a whole we stand with March CBOT wheat down 66 3/4 cents; March corn down 41 3/4 cents; Jan soybeans down 1 cent.

Early calls for this afternoon's CBOT session: corn and soybeans down 1-2c, wheat mixed.