Buyers bid on Thursday at $175/t fob POC for Ukrainian feed wheat shipping in April, bringing prices up in tandem with milling wheat and corn earlier in the week.
That said, steady demand from Spain tended towards shipment in June, July and August, rather than taking up offers of Ukrainian feed wheat for late-April-May shipment in the low-$220s/t ciffo Spain.
But with the volume of Ukrainian wheat left for export this marketing year rapidly running out, most local feed players remained focused on corn. Corn was readily available for delivery to Pivdennyi/Odesa/Chornomorsk (POC) ports, where major traders cut offers to offset a stronger hryvnia to the US dollar. This was less the case at the Romanian port of Constanta, market participants said, as there were far fewer sellers in the Danube river market.
As for barley, buyers in Morocco have yet to vouch for Ukrainian origin, despite importers reopening to Ukrainian milling wheat in the past month. Local port and line-up data show that Germany comfortably remained the market's largest barley supplier this marketing year, accounting for half of the 264,000t of barley which arrived at Moroccan ports in March.
That said, Morocco for the second month in a row imported a Handysize cargo of French barley, which had previously failed to compete with other European origins for much of the marketing year to date.
In the US, corn export sales continued to fall on the week, despite a fall in offer prices since the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its report on acreages one week ago.
Traders sold 948,000t of current-crop US corn for export in the week to 28 March, according to latest weekly data from the USDA. Top destinations included Japan, Mexico and Columbia.
Outside of these typical destinations for US corn, there was little opportunity to offload large volumes of feed grains — either corn or sorghum — elsewhere. A public holiday in China has fallen at a time when sellers of US corn loading from the Gulf managed to undercut offers of Ukrainian corn on a cif China basis.
In Argentina meanwhile, the corn harvest continued at pace with favourable weather in the past week, market participants said. The country's barley market was muted for feed grains, but some demand for malting barley emerged via a tender to buy for October shipment.
