The Morning Muse

Posted by Nogger - a legend in his own mind at 08:43 | Categorized as

25/03/11 -- Brussels announced late yesterday that they'd issued soft wheat export licences for 364,000 MT last week, bringing the marketing year to date total to just under 15 MMT with 14 weeks left to go in 2010/11.

That puts us around 2 MMT, or 15%, ahead of this time last year.

Meanwhile the IGC yesterday raised its estimate for world wheat production last year by 1 MMT to 649 MMT, but also increased 2010/11 consumption by a similar amount to 662 MMT, leaving ending stocks unchanged at 185 MMT.

Looking ahead to the coming season they pegged world grains production at a record 1.805 billion MT, slightly above the previous 2008/09 record of 1.802 billion. Wheat production will account for 673 MMT of that, an increase of 3.7%, they said. That would be the second largest world wheat crop ever, only failing to beat the 2008/09 record by 13 MMT.

Can 13 MMT, or less than 2% of global output, really be the wafer thin gap
between "burdensome" and "tight" accounting for whether UK wheat is GBP90/tonne or GBP200/tonne?

The FAO pegged 2011/12 world wheat production at 676 MMT earlier in the week, making that gap even narrower.