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Big world grain crops ease tight supply Records } USDA
forecasts biggest-ever global crops by charles abbott
TRACEABILITY: Canada Beef’s president questions the benefits
reuters
T
he world is harvesting its largest-ever wheat, corn and rice crops this year, easing tight supplies that drove world food prices to record levels earlier this year, the U.S. government forecast Dec. 9. With the abundant harvests, including a record wheat crop in Australia, world stockpiles will gain a modest cushion after successive years of razor-thin stocks. The U.S. soybean inventory would climb to the largest in five years. Larger harvests will further dampen market prices that are already at their lowest in a year. China led the sharp five per cent expansion in world corn production this year, the U.S. Agriculture Department said in an update of the world crop outlook. Chinese corn production is up eight per cent from a year. Record yields and favourable weather created a mammoth crop of 191.8 million tonnes. “There’s nothing here that is bullish,” said analyst Roy Huckaby of The Linn Group in Chicago. “They shut down consumption all over the place.” World wheat production is up six per cent this season from 2010-11 with a record 28.3 million tonnes in Australia. Rice output is up 2.4 per cent and soybeans are down 2.4 per cent although Brazil has a huge crop of 75 million tonnes that will allow it to beat the U.S. as the top exporter. In the face of competition from Brazil and Argentina, U.S. soybean exports are forecast down two per cent from the November estimate. The U.S. stockpile would rise to 230 million bushels, larger than traders expected and the largest year-end supply since 574 million bushels in 2006-07. The U.S. corn stockpile would be fractionally larger than thought a month ago but still the smallest in 16 years.
Appeal:
T
raceability has been the Holy Grail of the beef business since the BSE crisis, but Canada’s top beefmarketing official says foreign buyers aren’t asking for it and the whole concept needs a second look.
by sheri monk af staff | calgary
“My question is who are we doing this for? ” Canada Beef Inc. president Robert Meijer said in an interview. “Who’s asking and how are we validating this? Because nobody is asking me. I was in Asia, and I was directly asking consumers about traceability and they had no idea what I was talking about and it wasn’t the language barrier. They fundamentally couldn’t understand why I was asking them about traceability.” Meijer’s questioning the demand for traceability raised eyebrows — and earned the applause of some attendees
— when he spoke at the recent annual general meeting of Alberta Beef Producers. “All I was trying to do (at the meeting) was just validate what I heard, saw, observed while I was in a key market, in a key region that apparently we continue to hear wants this robust traceability,” said Meijer. “That’s not what I heard, and that’s not the perspective I got.” Meijer said Asian buyers and consumers are looking for the same thing domestic customers are. “They want quality, they want integrity, they want food safety, they want honesty, and they want to trust the people who they are doing business with,” he said. Meijer was careful to note his job with
“My question is who are we doing this for? Who’s asking and how are we validating this? Because nobody is asking me.” Robert meijer president, canada beef inc.
Canada Beef is to sell beef and to bring back market intelligence, not to form policy. As a result, it is the marketing agency’s responsibility to accurately reflect all the factors influencing demand, and he said traceability wasn’t even on the radar screen. “Do they need to know that if a package of meat came from High River, that the package of meat can be traced back to a specific carcass and to a specific farm to a specific producer? That didn’t seem to be anything of any interest to any consumer that I was talking to. I talked to some consumers, some mothers, at a grocery store about traceability and half of them didn’t even know what I was talking about.” Traceability as it pertains to health protocols has merit, but as part of a foodsafety regiment rather than a marketing tool. “We see value in the animal health component of traceability, the RFID, and we’ve got CCIA and the tags,” he said. “I get really worried about
see traceability } page 6
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