BLBG:Soybeans Top $17 For First Time As Demand Jumps For U.S. Exports
Soybeans climbed to a record as importers rushed to secure U.S. supplies on concern that the nation’s harvest would be smaller than the government’s latest forecast after the worst drought in half a century parched crops.
Soybeans for November delivery gained as much as 1.1 percent to $17.0125 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, an all-time high for the most-active contract. Futures were at $16.9875 at 3:52 p.m. in Singapore. The U.S. was the largest producer of soybeans in 2011-2012.
The oilseed, crushed to make cooking oil and feed for livestock, surged 41 percent this year, the most on the Standard & Poor’s GSCI index of 24 commodities. The drought, which also shriveled the corn crop in the top grower, spurred the biggest jump in world food costs last month since 2009. The amount of U.S. soybeans inspected for export rose 36 percent in the week ended Aug. 16, Department of Agriculture said yesterday.
“We haven’t got to a point where we’ve seen enough rationing of demand to really help the global balance sheet,” said Victor Thianpiriya, an agricultural commodity strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. Prices will need to stay around the record for “a while” before demand may decline, he said by phone from Singapore.
Soybean-meal futures for December delivery advanced as much as 1.3 percent to a record $519.40 per 2,000 pounds before trading at $518.90.
Crop Conditions
About 31 percent of the U.S. soybean crop was rated good or excellent as of Aug. 19, little changed from 30 percent a week earlier, the USDA said yesterday. The agency on Aug. 10 cut its soybean production forecast to 2.69 billion bushels, the lowest since 2007, while corn harvest was reduced to 10.779 billion bushels, a six-year low.
Corn for December delivery rose 0.3 percent to $8.265 a bushel. Futures reached a record $8.49 a bushel on Aug. 10.
About 23 percent of corn was rated good or excellent for a third straight week, the USDA said. About 51 percent of the crop was poor or very poor, unchanged from a week earlier. Corn yields in Ohio fell more than the USDA forecast earlier this month as hot, dry weather damaged reproducing crops in July, according to findings published from the annual Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour. Soybean pod counts dropped from a year ago.
“The stabilization of crop conditions is providing a false sense of security,” Wayne Gordon, a strategist at UBS AG in New York, said in a report dated yesterday. Early harvest results show poor grain quality and quantity and “anecdotes suggest abandonment is higher than the USDA forecast,” he said, referring to corn.
U.S. corn farmers hurt by the drought probably will harvest smaller crops than the government forecast this month, based on an analysis of dry spells in the past 42 years. In the five drought years since 1970, farmers on average harvested 85.4 percent of the acres planted, USDA data show. That’s below the 90.6 percent that the agency has predicted for this year.
Wheat for December delivery rose as much as 0.7 percent to $9.09 a bushel, the highest since Aug. 10, and was at $9.065.
To contact the reporters on this story: Phoebe Sedgman in Melbourne at psedgman2@bloomberg.net; Luzi Ann Javier in Singapore at ljavier@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Poole at jpoole4@bloomberg.net
