Nogger's Blog

05/12/11 -- EU grains finished mostly lower with Jan 12 London wheat down GBP0.15/tonne to GBP143.00/tonne and Jan 12 Paris wheat falling EUR1.50/tonne to EUR179.75/tonne.

All eyes are on Europe this week, as Merkel and Sarkozy meet in Paris today ahead of an EU summit on Friday. Following today's meeting the two main protagonists issued a joint statement saying that treaty changes to prevent a repetition of the Eurozone crisis "should" be in place by March.

Ideally, they'd like all EU-27 members to vote these changes through.

At the very least though those changes, which include outside checks on budget deficits and sanctions against those that breech them, will need to be ratified by all 17 member states that use the euro. How easy (and how long) to obtain that will prove to be is anybody's guess.

Meanwhile these alterations don't appear to contain anything to address the current debt problems.

Whilst all this is going on the grain markets are left in limbo, trading in a narrow range.

France Export Cereales say that the country is unlikely to export more than 200,000 MT of wheat to Egypt in the current marketing year - just 8% of what they sold the world's leading wheat buyer in 2010/11.

Vietnam is said to be buying Australian feed wheat at USD255/tonne including freight, around USD20-25/tonne cheaper than it was a month ago, from a nation awash with low grade wheat for the second year in a row.

Japan is buying Argentine corn and sorghum as Asian buyers turn away from more expensive US corn.

Ukraine's Ag Ministry has lowered it grain export forecast for the current season from 26-27 MMT to 23-24 MMT. Corn will constitute around half of that, according to the USDA. Some private analysts peg corn's share of the export market significantly higher than that.