Nogger's Blog

04/07/11 -- America is closed and Andy Murray has confirmed his position as a useless Jock git.

Russia wasted no time in flexing it's export muscles by shipping 1.1 MMT of grain on day one of the new free for all season, according to its Deputy Prime Minister.

Algeria say that they bought 150,000 MT of new crop feed barley at around USD290 CIF over the weekend. Bit expensive that Algeria, they must have seen you coming you muppets.

Talking of which, Richard Branson's long awaited engineer came round this morning. You will be unsurprised to hear that half of the Virgin Media broadband in town went down last Monday. It's a shame then that the Mumbai call centre didn't know about that when they were insisting that there was nothing wrong then wasn't it. Sigh.

Ukraine say that they finished the 2010/11 marketing year exporting around 12 MMT of grains, including 5 MMT of corn, 4 MMT of wheat and 2.7 MMT of barley.

Recent rains there are said to have improved spring crop conditions no end, although they are delaying winter grain harvesting. Only a small quantity of wheat has been cut so far, but yields are said to be up by more than a third on last year.

My chum Mike Lee over there says "crops look much better after the rain of late, sunny weather with occasional showers, may be the Minister of Ag might be right with his bumper crop predictions!"

Large managed funds cut their net CBOT corn longs by 18% last week, and piled out of soybeans to an even greater extent, down 22%, according to CFTC data.

A report on Reuters suggests that getting the G20 to agree on some form of regulation on speculative activity in the commodities markets is like "herding cats".

"Most governments see little benefit in new rules that could harm their financial interests," they say. Our own Minister for Agriculture is quoted as saying: "We are not persuaded that speculation is the fundamental problem". He might change his mind when I get hold of him later in the year.