Philippines passed on their tender for 150kt of feed wheat and 150kt of feed barley on Friday. This appears to be a strategy to reduce prices as they were not in line with expectations.
The announcement last week that Ukraine wheat would soon be back in the mix had a few buyers thinking an immediate fall in price should be reflected. When in fact the chance of seeing a huge volume of Ukrainian wheat flood onto the international market in the short term is quite remote.
Ukraine has a long way to go in both accumulation at port, port infrastructure and more importantly ensuring those vessels willing to move into ports that they will be loaded and despatched in a timely manner, complete with an insurance policy that doesn’t make this wheat uncompetitive.
There are rumours that the first 26kt of corn that left Ukraine last week has been refused by the buyer. I’m not sure if this is a contractual issue or a quality issue.
Two smaller vessels are said to have docked for loading, these will be a test case for buyers and insurers. With Ukraine grain exports about half of where they were this time last year one would assume they will be pushing as hard as they can to get as much wheat and corn out of those ports as quick as they can. A lot will be learnt over the next few weeks but if successful one can’t help but think prices may faulter a little in the short to midterm.

90% of the US corn crop is flowering, 45% dough and 4% denting. The crop rating slipped 3% to 58% G/E in last night’s crop update. This is starting to make the current USDA yield projection look very ambitious. Soybeans rated G/E were back 1% to 59%. Cotton was back 7% to 31% G/E, that’s big hit. US spring wheat also saw a big drop in the G/E percentage, from 70% last week to 64% this week, the current heat wave is not helping.