French bumper wheat harvest finds offshore markets

French officials look on to 10% less of their expected year-end inventories as the country found new markets last month for its bumper wheat supplies.

The French farm office, FranceAgriMer, said the country will end the 2009-10 marketing year with stocks of 3.52 million tonnes of grain.

The revised forecast reflects better hopes for exports which will hit 9.2 million tonnes during the crop year, some 400,000 tonnes higher than the volume shipped in 2008-09.

After a slow start to 2010, European grain exports have recently picked up with new buyers such as the Philippines where UK shipped wheat for the first time in a number of years. French wheat has also been shipped to Brazil, Mexico and Thailand, prior to its historic stronghold in North Africa, where import demand has been sapped by strong domestic crops.

"We benefitted from our wheat's competitiveness, helped by a drop in prices that took place in early March and the relative fall of the euro at that time," said Michel Ferret, FranceAgriMer's head of markets.

The euro has lost 10% against the US dollar since early December, weakened by the sovereign debt crisis in Greece

The bureau also trimmed its estimate for French barley stocks by 104,000 tonnes to 3.7 million tonnes at the close of 2009-10, citing higher sales to other EU countries, notably to the Netherlands. Still, inventories will have more than doubled in a year. For corn, the year-end estimate was raised by 194,000 tonnes to 2.68 million tonnes.