Traders say Iraq buys US wheat, no confirmation

European traders said on Tuesday that US suppliers had clinched a potentially ground-breaking wheat deal with Iraq, but there was no confirmation of the deal in the United States or Iraq. The traders said Iraq's Grain Board had purchased about 300,000 tonnes of US hard red winter wheat in a tender.
If confirmed, it would be one of the single largest sales of wheat to Iraq in recent years.
According to the European traders about 150,000 tonnes were purchased at $261 a tonne delivered to warehouse in Iraq, the price to include road transport as well as shipping. One trader said this consignment was 165,000 tonnes.
A further 150,000 tonnes were purchased at a lower price which was not immediately known, the traders said.
Nashville, Tennessee-based commodities exporter Telwar International, which has sold wheat, sugar and other food items to Iraq over the past two decades, said the company had yet to receive confirmation of a sale to the Grain Board.
"We submitted an offer to sell wheat, the Grain Board came back with a counter-offer. We are waiting for final confirmation," a spokesman for the company said.
A US trader said there was talk that Telwar sold 150,000 tonnes of wheat to the Grain Board.
Both consignments were for January/February shipment.
Traders stressed that communications with Iraq were immensely difficult, with telephones not working, so details were difficult to obtain.
Bidding in the Iraq Grains Board tender to buy 100,000 to 150,000 tonnes of optional-origin wheat had been extended to January 10 from December 15, 2004.
Iraq has repeatedly said it would buy US wheat in recent months but actual purchases have been modest.
In the 2004 marketing season beginning June 1, the US sold 159,000 tonnes of wheat to Iraq all of which has been shipped.
But this pales by comparison with Iraq's October 7 purchase of about one million tonnes from Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd.
In the 1980s and 1990s the United States was a major supplier of wheat to Iraq, but since then Australia has stepped in as the primary supplier of wheat bought by Baghdad.
The US Department of Agriculture estimates that Iraq will buy around 2.6 million tonnes of wheat this year. Another US source puts the figure at around 3 million tonnes.