What's Going On This Morning?

The Chinese and Argies are making no progress in talks to resolve their trade dispute, according to a story on Dow Jones News. It says that China lifting the ban on Argie soyoil imports is "unlikely" to happen during 2010. If they're right does that mean we will see Chinese soybean imports to 50 MMT this year? I think it might.

With just four weeks left in the 2009/10 marketing year Brussels has issued soft wheat export licences for just over 16 MMT, 4 MMT lower than at the same time last season. Wheat imports meanwhile are almost 3 MMT lower than a year ago at 2.9 MMT.

It looks like the intervention book has been closed, with 5.5 MMT of mostly barley now residing in stores across Europe, mercifully only 150,000 MT of that is here in the UK.

Egypt bought 180,000 MT of wheat in yesterday's tender split 120,000 Russian and 60,000 MT French. The French wheat was reportedly sold at USD171.77 FOB plus USD32.55 freight.

Heavy rain is forecast across the Canadian prairies over the weekend, that will further hinder spring planting progress which is already well behind schedule.

The spread between Minneapolis hard red spring wheat and Chicago soft red winter wheat continues to widen. Two months ago the differential was 34 cents, last night it was 57 cents.

The USDA are out a day later than usual with their weekly export sales report at 13.30 BST. Soybean sales are expected to be 200-400,000 MT, corn sales 700,000 MT to 1.25 MMT, and wheat sales 250-500,000 MT. Will there be any corn sales to China?

I'm indebted to William England for emailing me to suggest I gets Mrs N#3 down to the shops pronto to avail myself of an atlas. "Czechoslovakia does NOT exist having shed communism in 1989 and then divided amicably into the Czech Republic and Slovkia in 1993," William points out.

Has anyone ever seen that Monty Python restaurant sketch where the diner politely asks for a clean knife whereupon the owner suffers a mental breakdown and stabs himself for allowing such a heinous crime against humanity to be permitted on his premises?

And by the way William where's the chuffin 'eck is Slovkia when it's at home? You're making this stuff up aren't you?