Following the release of its 2023 New Wheat Crop report in November of last year, Cereals Canada led four international New Wheat Crop Trade and Technical Missions to showcase the quality of Canadian wheat to customers and buyers. Mission team members included representatives of the Canadian Grain Commission (CGC), exporters and farmers from four provincial wheat organizations.
China is a top destination for Canadian barley, canola and wheat. Canada has typically had the largest market share for canola and been competitive in malting barley. Both of these crops have experienced the rollercoaster of Chinese trade policy. While market access for canola was restricted during the Huawei crisis, Canadian barley benefitted from China’s diplomatic spat with Australia. Generally unaffected by politics, Canada is China’s main source of high-quality wheat, primarily CWRS.
The global beer industry has faced significant headwinds the past few years. The pandemic, followed by the escalation of input costs, supply chain difficulties and shifts in consumer preference hit hard, but not all is doom and gloom. China’s brewing industry is quite profitable and markets such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico continue to thrive and grow. In 2022, global beer production rose in 2022 to 1.89 million hectolitres (mln hL) from 1.87 in 2021, an increase of 1.33 per cent, or a little more than the beer output of Canada.
Today, AI and its corollary of machine learning have recently become buzzwords everywhere, including agriculture. The implementation of both requires data. It is readily available but, in the area of harvest data, sorely lacks veracity.
The market, defined here as the elements that converge to establish the price for any given commodity or service, has always been hard to discern. Its inscrutable nature promotes the dream of building a “black box” technology that removes human fallibility and emotion from the equation.
In recent years, the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC) has worked with major malting and brewing customers in China to facilitate commercial malting and brewing trials. This is the final stage in the roughly three-step process to secure new variety acceptance by end-users.
Following a five-year gap, the federal government reintroduced extended interswitching to the rail system with its 2023 budget. The action was taken at the recommendation of the government’s National Supply Chain Task Force report released in October 2022. Western Grain Elevator Association (WGEA) executive director Wade Sobkowich believes interswitching legislation must go further to make rail freight shipment more competitive.
The job of an agricultural analyst is to have an opinion on every topic and an answer for every question. And most of us prefer fundamentals—supply and demand. However, in 2022, macroeconomics and geopolitics held sway and muted some of the price movements that could have occurred if fundamentals dominated the market. Moreover, the variables needed for any model explaining potential price direction have expanded. To get my bearings at times like these, I resort to the Coma Test.
The Port of Prince Rupert is a remote but critical link in the Canadian crop export chain. Located in Prince Rupert Harbour just south of the Alaska Panhandle on British Columbia’s rugged Pacific coastline, its facilities are strung along a 20-kilometre stretch of Kaien Island, adjacent to the Prince Rupert townsite.
Markets, trade and technical services are at the core of Cereals Canada operations. With the onset of COVID-19 in spring 2020, many of the organization’s activities, including international new crop missions, were conducted virtually. This past July, Cereals Canada returned to in-person operations.
