Black Sea region cuts winter grain area, Ukraine sees smaller harvest


KYIV/MOSCOW Nov 16 Russia and Ukraine, the
leading wheat producers in the Black Sea region, have cut their
2016 winter wheat sowing area due to dry weather, analysts and
traders said, signalling more risks of next year’s crop and
exports.

The two countries combined are expected to export 38.5
million tonnes of wheat this 2015/16 marketing season,
accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s wheat trade,
according to a USDA forecast.

Excessively dry weather in eastern, central and southern
Ukraine has prompted farmers to terminate winter sowing, leaving
around 11 percent of the area unsown, agriculture ministry data
showed.

“The sowing is completed and the situation is very bad. We
still have four huge regions where crops are in a very poor
condition,” Tetyana Adamenko, head of the agriculture department
at Ukraine’s state weather centre, told Reuters.

She said that only 20 percent of the sown crops had sprouted
in the Zaporizhya region and 22 percent in Dnipropetrovsk. The
situation is also bad in the Poltava, Kharkiv and Donetsk
regions, she added.

Ukraine’s leading agriculture consultancy, UkrAgroConsult,
on Monday cut its forecast for Ukraine’s 2016 wheat harvest by
about 8 percent to 17.5 million tonnes, citing the poor
condition of sprouted crops.

“Only 62 percent of sown winter grain has sprouted so far
and around 30 percent of it is in a poor state. This has forced
us to revise the outlook,” analyst Yelizaveta Malyshko said.

Traders expect Ukraine’s 2016 wheat harvest at between 14
and 18 million tonnes. This year the country harvested about 25
million tonnes.

“We see no more than 17 million tonnes of wheat next year.
And the outlook is negative,” a large foreign trader said.

“Poor weather this winter and an early and hot spring could
cut the harvest even to 13 million tonnes,” another trader said.

SOWING IN RUSSIA

Russian farmers have cut winter grain sowing due to dry
weather in several regions this year and are likely to sow up to
16.4 million hectares this year, Igor Pavensky, deputy head of
strategic marketing at rail infrastructure operator
Rusagrotrans, told Reuters.

As of Nov. 13, Russian farmers had sown winter grains on
16.2 million hectares, down from 16.6 million hectares a year
ago and on 95 percent of the originally planned area.

There is no clarity on what percent of sown winter grains is
currently in good, satisfactory or bad condition. State weather
forecaster Hydrometcentre usually prepares this estimate in
December and updates it in March.

Currently, the condition of winter grains is good or
satisfactory “almost everywhere”, Alexander Frolov, the head of
Hydrometcentre, told Reuters.

He declined to forecast next year’s harvest, but said that
based on the level of moisture in soil, the prospects for 2016
winter grains crop are “not worse and even slightly better than
last year.”

“Everything depends on the coming winter,” Frolov said.
“There are forecasts that this year’s winter will be temperate
in the main grain-sowing regions, excluding, possibly, Siberia.”

(Additional reporting by Andrey Kuzmin in Moscow; Editing by
Susan Fenton)