Corn Climbs on Signs of Increased China Demand; Soybeans Drop

By Phoebe Sedgman - Apr 26, 2012
BLOOMBERG
Corn rebounded from two days of declines on signs of increased Chinese demand for U.S. supplies. Soybeans dropped as a rally to the highest price since 2008 spurred investor sales.

Corn for July delivery gained as much as 0.7 percent to $6.05 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade and was at $6.035 at 2:28 p.m. in Singapore.

Futures fell yesterday and on April 24 after the U.S. reported the first case of mad-cow disease in six years, prompting speculation that feed use may drop.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the third corn export sale in as many days yesterday, bringing total purchases this week to 1.28 million metric tons. Exporters sold 682,500 tons, including 262,500 tons to China and 420,000 tons for unknown destinations, the USDA said. China Grain Reserves Corp., manager of the country’s state grain stockpiles commonly known as Sinograin, bought U.S. corn since last week to strengthen state inventories, spokesman Cheng Bingzhou said today.

“There was a sale of over 600,000 tons to unknown destinations, which I suspect will turn out to be China,” said Adam Davis, a commodity trader at Merricks Capital Services Pty. Earlier this week, the USDA announced exporters sold 480,000 tons to unknown destinations for delivery before the end of the marketing year on Aug. 31 and 120,000 tons for unknown buyers after Sept. 1.

Shippers must report any export sale of 100,000 tons or more in one day to a single destination, according to the USDA. As of April 19, the U.S. had shipped 118 million bushels of corn to China since Sept. 1, more than double the 53.7 million during the same period a year earlier, USDA data show.

Chinese Imports

China may have purchased 2 million tons of new-crop U.S. corn since last Thursday that will be delivered in the 2012-2013 marketing year, state-owned researcher Grain.gov.cn said today, without saying where it got the information. Imports may be more than 5 million tons in 2011-2012, the China National Grain & Oils information center said.

Soybeans for July delivery dropped as much as 0.6 percent to $14.665 a bushel before trading at $14.6825. Prices rallied yesterday to $14.9675, the highest level since July 18, 2008.

“It might be down today on a bit of profit-taking on such a strong run up, but it’s still fundamentally well-supported,” Davis said. South America’s soybean crop has deteriorated, while Europe’s rapeseed harvest looked terrible, he said.

Soybean output in Argentina, the top exporter of soy-based animal feed and cooking oil, may drop 15 percent from 2011 to 42 million tons, researcher Oil World said April 24.

About 29 percent of rapeseed crops and winter grains in Poland, the European Union’s third-largest grain producer behind France and Germany, were destroyed by weather, the Central Statistical Office said yesterday.

Wheat for July delivery dropped as much as 0.3 percent to $6.245 a bushel and last traded at $6.2675.