Nogger's Blog

14/12/10 -- Customs data out today reveals that the UK exported almost 325,000 MT of wheat in October. Despite frantic tugging on the emergency cord, that's only 70,000 MT less than in September, and now brings the marketing year to date total to almost 1.2 MMT.

That's just 100,000 MT shy of Defra's anticipated exportable surplus for the whole of the 2010/11 period just a third of the way through the MY.

How much further down the track this runaway train is going to career is anybodies guess. If it was to continue at this pace we'd be looking at a shocking 3.5-3.6 MMT by the end of June.

Now nobody is suggesting that that will happen, but the more realistic figure of 2 MMT that many in the trade have been talking about for the past month or so is perhaps now starting to also look too low.

From what I have been hearing November wasn't exactly a quiet month on the export front either. We could easily be looking at 1.6-1.7 MMT having been shipped out by the end of the calendar year, with fully six months of the season still remaining.

Could this prompt some sort of US-style regulation on UK (and/or EU) grain exports? After all, right now nobody actually knows the size of the existing commitments for the rest of the season do they? At least not collectively.

Nah, that sounds like far too sensible an idea to me, lets carry on muddling along in the dark with out of date information. It's always worked up until now.