COMMODITIES: Prices of soybean ,wheat and corn dropped on Monday, pressured by a firmer US dollar while traders continued to monitor negotiations after a wheat shipment left Ukraine as part of the Black Sea grain deal.
The most-active soybean contract on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) was down 0.9% at $13.83 a bushel, as of 0351 GMT, wheat gave up 0.4% to $8.47-3/4 a bushel, and corn lost 0.8% to $6.78-1/2 a bushel.
The dollar index strengthened 0.2%, making greenback-priced commodities more expensive for overseas buyers.
Ukraine said a ship carrying 40,000 tonnes of wheat departed on Sunday from Chornomorsk bound for Yemen, but uncertainty remained over whether the Grain Initiative could extend beyond the Nov. 19 deadline.
Regardless, market participants anticipated the Black Sea export corridor to extend.
Wheat production in Australia is forecast at 34 million tonnes in 2022/23, down from the record-breaking 2021/22 crop of 36.3 million tonnes but still the second-largest in history, the US Department of Agriculture attache said in a report.
CBOT wheat still targets $8.19-3/4 to $8.22 range
Meanwhile, China’s soybean imports in September jumped 12% to 7.72 million tonnes from a year earlier, customs data showed, reversing a months-long trend of low arrivals.
The world’s top buyer of soybean oil imports curbed purchases in prior months because of high global prices and poor profits from crushing.
However, the September imports were up from 6.88 million tonnes a year earlier, data from the General Administration of Customs showed, and also higher than August imports of 7.17 million tonnes.
China’s economy rebounded at a faster-than-expected pace in the third quarter, beating forecasts.
