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Continued Chinese U.S. corn purchases in question
An ag economist is questioning whether a large U.S. corn export sale to China earlier this week is a signal of this to come or just a one-off sale.
The University of Missouri’s Ben Brown says he’s seeing some projections expecting China to purchase 250 million more bushels of U.S. corn this year, but…
“To do that, we’re going to have to start seeing sales in the next couple of weeks,” he said. “And the data, to this point, just hasn’t signaled that we’re going to see that.”
Brown said Monday’s sale of nearly 43 million bushels could possibly hint at sales to come. But he tells Brownfield China’s recent large purchase could just be an ‘insurance’ buy.
“We’re concerned about the Black Sea region, the weather models in South America for that second crop Brazilian corn have turned dry; let’s go ahead and get an insurance product put in place to protect us in case corn prices just rally off the books.”
Brown said China took advantage of last week’s breaks in corn price coming off USDA’s acreage report. Brownfield interviewed Brown during the Brownfield Weekly Commodity Market Update.