EU: Malting barley markets show very little activity

There is very little activity to be reported from the European malting barley markets, GrainCom said in their latest newsletter on November 30.

Some local farmers pricing/selling in France led to once again lower market prices as the brewing and malting industry remains mostly absent from the procurement.

In hindsight it seems that the Christmas season has already started some months ago, the amount of activity in the market is extremely low, the GrainCom analysts said.

German maltsters continue to malt mostly local barley as transportation remains to be a big issue. At some point imports are going to be unavoidable.

Chinese importers continue to inquire for EU prices for Q1 and Q2 2019 and some business was already done.

Situation between China and Australia still is not clear and it looks like that this might drag on for some time to come. We will see a big rush of shipments between now and mid-January 19 in order to avoid any risk in import restrictions (which might come after 60 days since the antidumping probe has been initiated). It’s hard to imagine that the barley flow between Australia and China will be seriously affected, but in today’s (political) world nothing is impossible.

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