Grain trader East Point and a Romanian company jointly sold 100,000 tonnes of Romanian wheat to Iraq, in one of the European Union's rare grain deliveries to the Arab country, a trade source said on Wednesday. Iraq, one of the world's leading wheat importers, has in the past four years focused primarily on buying US grain, but has also bought some Canadian and Australian grain.
"We shipped 50,000 tonnes and a local firm another 50,000 in a joint arrangement to Iraq," a source from grain trading house East Point told Reuters, saying the buyer is the Iraqi government and that Iraq's Umm Qasr port is taking deliveries.
The source would not offer details on the price. Romania, which joined the EU in 2007, reaped 7.75 million tonnes of wheat in 2008, the biggest crop for four years and more than double that of 2007, leaving an export potential of around 1 million tonnes. European traders have speculated that Iraq's purchase of US wheat was largely politically motivated and said a large purchase from Europe would mark an enormous change in Iraq's wheat-buying strategy.