GRAIN MARKETS

Jonathan Lane, ADM Agriculture’s head of grain trading, comments on the wheat market: With little coming from USDA in last week’s report, weather has been driving the markets. Cold and drier conditions across much of the US, Canada and EU has led to increased speculative buying, pushing the market considerably higher over the past week. Additionally, renewed dryness concerns relating to Brazil’s second corn crop and the slow Argentinian corn harvest have supported higher global corn prices, providing external support to the wheat complex. While it may be too early to start writing off crops, there are enough weather-related issues to support the recent spike, as US spring sowings progress and northern hemisphere winter crops develop in far-from-ideal conditions. UK conditions are also less than perfect and there is little to no rain forecast in the next few weeks. Prices have rebounded and will probably be supported whilst current weather conditions prevail. UK wheat imports slowed in February to just 94,956t, although the accumulated season-to-date figure of 1.67mln t is still well above last season’s pace.