Warm and wet spring weather in leading Black Sea grain producers Russia and Ukraine, has paved the way for a large wheat harvest this year, analysts and traders said on Tuesday. Russia, a major global wheat exporter to North Africa and the Middle East, is so far on track to harvest a crop of more than 100 million tonnes for the third year in a row.
"Good precipitation during this spring has improved the condition of winter grains in regions where there were problems during the last autumn," said Anna Strashnaya, the head of the agricultural department at state weather forecaster Hydrometcentre. The favourable weather also sped up the sowing: the country's farmers have already sown 17.2 million hectares with spring grains, 55 percent of the planned area, compared with 15.2 million hectares at the same time a year ago. Spring wheat was sown on 5.4 million hectares, 41 percent of the planned area, up from 4.0 million hectares from a year ago.
"Russia is on its way to another large crop," said a trader. Hail in the southern region of Stavropol over the past weekend will not have any significant impact on grain production, he added. The agriculture ministry expects the grain crop to be no less than last year's harvest of 104.8 million tonnes, while SovEcon, a leading agriculture consultancy in Moscow, has upgraded its forecast for Russia's crop last week and now expects the biggest grain crop since 2008.
It expects the crop to come in at 105.4 million tonnes of grain, including 61.1 million tonnes of wheat. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently sees Russia's 2016 wheat crop at 63 million.
UKRAINE, KAZAKHSTAN The condition of Ukrainian wheat crops has improved sharply over the past several weeks, analyst UkrAgroConsult said. "The weather is ideal. Even those crops that were not supposed to go up, they have sprouted," the consultancy's Yelizaveta Malyshko said. She said UkrAgroConsult had revised up the Ukrainian wheat crop forecast for 2016 to 21.5 million tonnes from the previous estimate of 19.8 million tonnes. In early April it had forecast a wheat harvest of 18.5 million tonnes.
"We have increased our forecast (for wheat) by 1.5 million tonnes to 21.2 million tonnes thanks to perfect weather," a foreign trader said. "Almost all seeds are sprouted and the moisture content is enough for a good harvest." But even favourable weather is unlikely to compensate for a decrease in the sowing area, caused by a severe drought during the last summer and autumn, analysts said.
Ukraine, the world's third-largest grain exporter, harvested 26.5 million tonnes of wheat in 2015. Unfavourable weather could affect Kazakhstan, a traditional producer of high quality wheat. Viktor Aslanov from the Grains and Oilseeds Kazakhstan research bureau said it was too early to forecast the grain harvest, but added that floods in some regions were delaying the sowing, while the Akmola region, on the other hand, was suffering from a deficit of moisture.