Wheat, canola supply exceeds forecast
WINNIPEG — Projected inventories of wheat and canola before this year’s harvest topped forecasts by analysts in Canada, one of the world’s top grain exporters and the biggest producer of the oilseed.
Wheat stockpiles will fall 32 per cent to 7.11 million tonnes by July 31, and canola reserves will slump 23 per cent to 2.32 million tonnes, Statistics Canada said Thursday. The average estimates of six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News were 6.44 million for the grain and 1.38 million for the oilseed.
“The canola number is bizarre,” Ken Ball, a senior commodity futures adviser at PI Financial in Winnipeg, said in a telephone interview. “It’s pretty unusual to be out by that much versus expectation. The stocks are almost twice what was expected.”
The report is bearish for canola prices, he said. Through Wednesday, they climbed 5.9 per cent this year, partly because dry conditions on the Prairies eroded the crop outlook. Canola futures for November delivery fell 0.9 per cent to $461.50 a tonne on ICE Futures Canada in Winnipeg.
In August, Alberta declared a disaster after a severe drought parched the province’s wheat and canola fields. Canada’s output of the crops will fall to the lowest in five years following the adverse weather, the government said in an Aug. 21 report.
Inventories for most major crops were “notably reduced from the same date a year earlier” because of a bumper crop in 2013, Statistics Canada said Thursday.