The US Department of Agriculture has once again lowered its forecast for wheat exports from Russia, and this decline has been happening for several months in a row.
The April report of the Foreign Agricultural Service of the US Department of Agriculture (FAS USDA) once again shows a reduction in the forecast for wheat exports from Russia.
This time, the drop was 1 million tons, to 44 million tons.
According to analysts, this is due to the fact that Russia introduced a quota on wheat exports on February 15, which immediately took effect, since the rate of exports immediately slowed down after that.
At the same time, some Russian experts believe that the US Department of Agriculture, despite everything, is still overly optimistic. Although it has been lowering its forecasts for wheat exports for several months in a row, it has still not come close to a realistic estimate.
According to Vladimir Petrichenko, CEO of the analytical company ProZerno, the realistic level of wheat exports in the current season is no more than 40 million tons.
And if we take into account the current lull in exports, which occurred due to the introduction of the quota, then there is every reason to believe that the final figure will be even lower than 40 million tons, the expert believes.
At the same time, some experts still believe that the Russian Federation’s exports will amount to more than 40 million tons of wheat in the current season.
For example, this is the opinion of independent expert of the agricultural market Alexander Korbut. In his opinion, the volume of exports may amount to 43 million tons.
However, at the moment there are several factors that slow down the rate of exports.
The first of them is the strong ruble, which leads to the fact that exporters receive fewer rubles from each dollar received from foreign buyers. This contributes to them having less motivation to export, experts emphasize.
In addition, agricultural producers are currently not ready to reduce prices for their products, since the current season’s harvest was lower than in the previous one, for this reason a kind of deficit has formed on the market.
As for the volume of the new harvest, it also raises some doubts, since the situation with winter crops is still ambiguous.
Due to the low-snow winter, many regions of Russia have insufficient soil moisture, which may negatively affect the future vegetation of winter crops.
However, as analysts note, precipitation may improve the situation if it occurs in a timely manner in those regions where winter crops require moisture.
Despite everything, Russia may remain the leader in wheat supplies to the world market with a share of about 22%.
