Russians Admit Grain Harvest To Hit 100MMT

Well I never. Looks like I'm not Ruud van Nistelrooy after all. Those cheeky chappies at the Kremlin were too busy invading Georgia to count how much grain they had this year. Now they've gone and found several million tonnes of grain that they'd completely forgotten about planting. But based on my calculations even 100MMT is still a bit conservative. Russians eh, you know when they're lying, their lips move....

Russia's grain harvest will reach 100 million tons this year according to the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies (IKAR).

Presenting the forecast at the Russian Grain Union's 14th international conference in Moscow on this week, IKAR general director Dmitry Rylko said the gross grain harvest this year will total 100 million tons. In particular, the wheat harvest will reach 60 million tons, while the barley harvest will amount to 20 million tons. "Corn production could even post a record compared to the time of Krushchev and total 6 million tons," Rylko said.

The situation, however, is complicated by several factors, namely "the extremely large share of coarse wheat in the overall harvest, the unevenness in the distribution of grain quality - a large harvest and low quality in the European part of the country plus a small harvest and high quality in the Urals - as well as a sharp worsening in competition on export markets," he said. Grain exports could reach an all-time high of 18.5 million tons this year, he said.

A total of 3.46 million tons of grain had already been exported as of July 1, a record-high for recent years.