Wheat prices soar to record highs

Wheat prices soared to record highs on the Chicago Board of Trade and European markets on Wednesday as news of damage to key exporter Australia’s crop heightened concern about shrinking global stocks.

“That compounds what is already a fairly desperate problem,” said Simon Ingle, head of milling wheat for Britain’s largest farmer grain cooperative Grainfarmers.

“This is extremely serious. For importing nations like Egypt, India and Morocco they have got to pay at least twice as much for wheat as they did last year,” he added.
CBOT December wheat rose 30 cents in electronic trade to an all-time high of $8.35-1/2 a bushel while European milling wheat futures soared more than 5 percent to a record 300 euros ($407.8) a tonne on the benchmark November contract.

Hot winds this week caused severe damage to the Western Australian wheat crop, further reducing the country’s already struggling crop, Kim Chance, Western Australia’s agriculture minister, told Reuters.

Australia’s wheat crop could be 2 million tonnes lower than even the most pessimistic forecasts, Chance said.

The US Department of Agriculture has projected that world wheat stocks will drop to 114.8 million tonnes by the end of the 2007/08 marketing year, a 26-year low, following poor weather earlier this year in parts of Europe and the United States.

TradeArabia