World Grain - August 2011 - 31

REGIONAL REVIEW: NORTH AMERICA

In terms of wheat, North America is a key exporter of high-quality wheat to the world. It’s not necessarily the ﬁrst choice for many price-focused buyers. “We have almost treated it in the last ﬁve years as kind of a back of the larder scenario,” Watts said. “Because when the cheap Russian and Ukrainian wheat ran out, the world ran back to the U.S. and said have you got any wheat please? “When Russia and Ukraine are back in the market, you don’t see many people asking and potentially you see less U.S. wheat coming to the fore. It’s potentially ﬁller, I suppose. That’s sort of the role U.S. wheat has taken over the last few years. It has been critically important in years like 2007 and 2000 when we haven’t had any Russian and Ukrainian wheat and the world had to accept that it had to pay more for what is a vastly reliable source of wheat in the U.S. “The price does the talking really. When you’ve got Russian wheat at $30 under the U.S., everyone goes and buys Russian. When the Russian wheat disappears or there is a random export ban out of the blue, everyone goes back to the U.S.” Watts highlighted Canada’s important role, especially in the later part of the season. “When the bulk of the northern hemisphere harvest has come off, the Canadian crop is still coming off,” he said. “Canada is actually very good at responding to the wheat market if it gets the weather it needs to establish the crop, which is often the challenge because they are running off mainly spring wheat cropping.” He believes that Canadian farmers, given a kinder spring this year, would have reacted to high prices. “They would have tried to plant to that price, providing the northern hemisphere with their crop later in the season, a bit later on than a traditional harvest,” he said. “It’s very much a part of the world which responds to the market need very efﬁciently.” The same was true for malting barley. “You could almost say that Canada is one of China’s two breweries in the world, the other one being in Australia,” he said. Bruce Burnett, director of weather
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and market analysis at the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), outlined Canada’s importance in the world market. “Generally speaking, we are — and it depends on the year you’re looking at — sometimes the second, sometimes the third, sometimes the fourth largest exporter of wheat globally,” he told World Grain. “That’s dependent entirely

on our production of wheat during a particular year because of our climate being, I guess harsh is too harsh a word, but it is harsh. “Because of our short growing season, the production does vary greatly. But generally speaking, our ﬁve-year average production of wheat in Canada is around 25 million tonnes of total

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World Grain - August 2011

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