PARIS: European wheat prices edged lower on Wednesday in a market that traders said was lacking direction in the absence of new fundamental elements and was under pressure from a poor export outlook this season.

Benchmark December milling wheat on Paris-based Euronext unofficially closed down 0.1% at 184.00 euros a tonne.

"The low harvest in Europe has been priced in, now people look at demand and they realise that EU wheat will have a hard time competing on some export markets," one trader said.

Consultancy Agritel forecast that French soft wheat exports would fall to 13 million tonnes in the current 2020/21 season, down from 20.9 million tonnes in 2019/20, with shipments to Algeria falling sharply and none forecast to Egypt, which should mostly turn to Russia and Ukraine this season.

Egypt's state grains buyer, the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC), on Tuesday purchased 530,000 tonnes of Russian wheat for two shipment periods in October.

In Germany, traders continued to assess the quality of the new crop, with harvesting now over and flour mills having made heavy purchases of new crop wheat.

"Overall quality is reasonable although the national picture is still a little difficult to judge because of considerable regional variations," a German trader said.

German flour mills are believed to have bought several hundred thousand tonnes for a range of delivery dates in August to September 2020 and even up to June 2021 in the last couple of weeks, he said.

German new crop wheat shipments were relatively modest with recent ships sailing including vessels with about 30,000 tonnes for Algeria and 30,000 tonnes for Guinea.

"With the French harvest looking so small this summer there are hopes the big French customer Algeria will get more supplies from other countries," another trader said. "But Poland and the Baltic States are looking a lot cheaper than Germany currently."