United Kingdom: “The strength of Sterling and relative weakness of the US Dollar and Euro has not assisted UK export sales. UK malt exporters have been successful in exporting malt to Eastern Europe and Russia in recent years, but with new malting capacity coming on stream, those exports are threatened. This has been further exacerbated by the 2004 harvest being the most difficult for many years, pushing best quality malting barley prices considerably above those of our export competitors in mainland Europe, noticeably France, where the harvest has been very good.

From January 2005 a bilateral agreement between the Governments of Australia and Thailand will mean Australian malt exports to Thailand will be free of import taxes.

For UK maltsters to make their presence noticed in such a market place not only must the malt price be acceptable, but the customer must recognise the ‘value added’ benefit that differentiates that malt. Maltsters have been working for over three years to that end, and launched ‘Assured UK Malt’, the world’s first assurance scheme for malt in November 2003. Presentations on the importance of this new malting Standard were given to the Asia Pacific Conference of the Institute and Guild of Brewing in Hanoi in March 2004 , and to a European Brewing Congress workshop in May 2004,” MAGB Chairman Euan Macpherson mentioned in his annual statement at the Armourers Hall in London on November 8th 2004.

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