Europe continues to worry traders with its financial problems but we will soon be distracted with the London Olympics. You can bet that all the important European financial leaders have good tickets and won’t be spending much time in meetings.
I expect European worries will be tabled until after the Olympics. Then they will join their U.S. counterparts and go on vacation for the month of August. Look for European worries to quiet down for now but expect them to rear their ugly head again in September.
FCStone Research
Indonesia announced that they will drop a 5% tax on soybean imports for the rest of the calendar year. The USDA is expecting the country to import 2.1 million tons of soybeans in 2012-13, a record number but only steadily higher since Indonesia imported 1.15 million tons of beans in 2007-08.
The Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation raised their wheat production forecast by a million tons today, to 14.5 million tons. That’s 1.5 million tons above the current USDA 2012-13 estimates. They also increased their barley output number by 800,000 tons to 6.5 million tons.
The country’s Ag Minister estimated total grain output at 45-46 million tons, compared to 45-47 million tons last month, with wheat making up 14 million tons of that. Wheat yields are running at 2.53 tons per hectare (37.6 bpa) with over 80% of the crop harvested, versus 3.23 tons per ha last season. The Ag Min said they have “no plans” to introduce grain export quotas.
Smithfield Foods yesterday said they’d import corn from Brazil, with economics now favoring Brazilian supplies shipped to the U.S. East Coast over U.S. corn sent by rail from the Midwest; amounts or timelines are unknown, but the company is the first to publicly confirm imports from Brazil, with other producers such as Tyson rumored to have made purchases as of late.
