Nogger's Blog

11/10/11 -- EU grains finished sharply higher with Nov London wheat up GBP3.65/tonne to GBP151.00/tonne and Nov Paris wheat climbing EUR7.75/tonne to EUR191.75/tonne.

Grains were lower to narrowly mixed for much of the day but jumped into the close on news out of the blue that Russia was considering introducing export duties on grains.

Short-covering ahead of tomorrow's USDA reports also seemed to be a factor.

The word out of Russia late in the day was that they may decide to introduce some sort of export levy system due to the frenetic pace of foreign sales so far during the 2011/12 marketing year.

They've certainly been an aggressive adversary as far as EU and US wheat is concerned, although it should be noted that Ukraine may be only too willing to step into the void, if one should appear, having just got it's own export duties scrapped in order to compete with it's neighbour. Kazakhstan too would be eager to seize any advantage offered to it by virtue of limits on Russian sales.

Other news suggests that a deal has been done between the EU/IMF and ECB to allow Greece to get it's next tranche of bailout funds in early November and thus avoid an imminent default. The market is still awaiting news from Slovakia as to whether they will pass or veto proposals to approve the guarantee of EUR7.7 billion toward the EFSF bailout fund.

Elsewhere French grains institute Arvalis say that record corn yields this year are "guaranteed" at a minimum of 10 MT/ha with around 40% of the crop in the bin.