Russia & Ukraine: In the Black Sea Grain Conference in Kiev Russian and Ukrainian speakers stressed the strong role of their countries in world grain markets. Port installations and infrastructure are continuously improved. There is a strong trend towards winter wheat production in the southern half of European Russia, which may limit spring barley crops in future years. For 2005 SovEcon expects a barley crop of 17 million tonnes, IGC, however, 18.5 million tonnes in Russia.

UkrAgroConsult forecasts 8.8 million tonnes of barley in the Ukraine after 11.1 million tonnes in 2004. Winter disappears very reluctantly in Eastern Europe, in the southern parts of Russia and the Ukraine planting of spring barley will be few weeks late, the risk is that winter will turn into a warm and dry summer too quickly. Russia has a malting capacity of 1 million tonnes, i.e. barley needs of 1.25 million tonnes. Old crop supplies of maltable barley are exhausted, and after imports of approx. 200,000 tonnes of malting barley till the middle of March the country will need to buy a few hundred thousand tons more, before new crop domestic barley becomes available. At the same time feed barley exports of Russia picked up a bit in recent months, 740,000 tonnes were shipped since July, 2004 until the middle of March of this year. An unofficial Ukrainian estimate puts feed barley exports till March 20 at 3.95 million tonnes, shipments for the whole grain year are forecast at 4.2 to 4.3 million tonnes. This would entail very small carryover stocks of 200,000 tonnes or less. Nevertheless feed markets are weakish, world demand has dried up.

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