Long-awaited showers finally hit French grain fields over the weekend and more rain is expected this week in most key European producers, but it will likely not be enough to reverse drought damage to winter crops.
"For the moment it is not a revolution," Strategie Grains head analyst Andree Defois said about the French crop.
High volatility and price swings in food commodities are likely to prevail for the rest of this year and could continue into 2012, UN body Food and Agriculture Organisation today said.
Global food prices continue to rise month after month, driven by longer-term and more recent trends. Financialisation is an important factor among the recent trends. There is strong evidence of correlation among the markets for different financial assets, including stocks/shares, commodities and currencies. Falling asset prices in other financial market segments may thus be more important for explaining the recent surge in food prices than supply constraints or changing demand and other factors underlying longer-term gradual upward price trends.
The production of food grains is projected to increase in the current fiscal year compared to last year.
According to the preliminary projections of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MoAC) released on Wednesday, the total production of food gains will increase by 11 percent this year.
The MoAC's projection also unveiled that the total cereal production (rice, maize, wheat, millet
Climate change cut global wheat and corn output by more than 3 percent over the past three decades compared to growth projections without a rise in temperatures, a study found on Friday.
Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980-2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability.
The FAO Global Information and Early Warning System has released the latest Global Food Price Monitor, citing an increase in the FAO Cereal Price Index in April. Global prices of wheat and maize increased sharply last month, while global rice prices continued to decline.
Incessant rains have turned Indiana farmer Larry Winger's grain fields into ponds, making it impossible for him to seed his corn crop.
"Historically, we would like the work to be done by the first of May, and research shows the optimal planting time is the last week of April," said Winger, who plants half of his 2,500 acres with corn, and the other half with soybeans.
