TIME TO TAKE STOCK
It is often said that the older you get the quicker the years pass by. I didn’t realise how true this is until recently and, as I sat down to write about something other than Brexit, Social Media or President Trump I suddenly found myself asking where have the last five years gone?
The UK wheat harvest of 2012 was probably the worst on record. In terms of quality, it was, without question, the worst we had ever seen. Following the wettest Autumn since records began and the coldest Winter in 50 years, we harvested a very small, very low specific weight crop that presented problems for the food processing industry for the rest of the season. Since then we have had an unprecedented run of five consecutive bumper world wheat harvests with very few problems other than a few minor quality anomalies. For some, this extended run of large harvests will have been a welcomed reprieve from recent previous ones, including those of dubious quality and historically high prices. For others, however, it seems that life has been a little dull, that is until recently.
The first signs that things could be about to change became apparent back in early 2017 when world ending wheat stocks were predicted to reach a record level of 252 million tonnes equating to a stocks to use ratio of almost 30%, a level not seen since the turn of the millennium. What wasn’t widely talked about until a little later that season was that 44% of that stock was reported to be in China, thus leaving the rest of the world vulnerable in the event of production problems caused by the weather. As it happened later in the year, we did get a taste of what could happen as an extended dry period prompted markets to rally late in the growing season, peaking only when it became a strong possibility that Russia would produce a crop which, on paper, would restore the supply to satisfy predicted demand.
10 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | May/June 2018
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