Russia is on track to harvest its largest crop in six years of more than 100 million tonnes of grains, including at least 56 million tonnes of wheat, Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov said on Wednesday. The country will have a 2014/15 exportable surplus of 27 million to 30 million tonnes of grains, of which wheat is likely to account for 70 percent, if the crop exceeds 100 million tonnes, Fyodorov said in an interview at the Reuters Russia Investment Summit.
Russia, one of the world's largest wheat exporters, is harvesting the second-largest crop in its post-Soviet history and has already exported 9.9 million tonnes of grains since the start of the current 2014/15 marketing year on July 1. In late August, the Agriculture Ministry said in a letter to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that export restrictions could be an option if exports exceeded 26.9 million tonnes of grain out of an expected crop of 100 million tonnes this year.
However, officials said the government was not considering an export ban and the letter only included a list of options related to monitoring the grain market situation, not proposals. Fyodorov sees a grain export ban as an "absolutely unacceptable" instrument for market regulation, he said at the summit, held at the Reuters office in Moscow. He added that Russia, which is turning east after the West imposed sanctions over Moscow's role in Ukraine, was considering two joint projects with China: to build a railway grain terminal and to build an agroindustrial complex.
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