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Big crops fetching low prices as input costs rise, sound familiar? European producers are feeling a pinch similar to that suffered by U.S. producers.
Agricultural commodities, including grains and sugar, have plummeted on futures markets in the face of rising global supplies, while European producers contend with high input costs and increasingly competitive global rivals, the Financial Times reported Monday.
“We’re drilling this week in the knowledge that we’re not going to make any money from it,” U.K. farmer Charles Bracey, who grows wheat, sugar beet and vegetables over two farms totaling 1,000 acres in Norfolk, told the newspaper. “Prices are grim and it doesn’t look like they are going to get any better.”
Benchmark wheat futures are down more than 20% this year after bumper harvests in Russia, Australia and parts of South America, the report noted, while speculators have built up bets on falling prices. Investment funds added more than 280,000 new short lots in milling wheat futures in the week ended Nov. 21, the FT said, citing Euronext data. That’s left wheat prices little more than half the levels seen in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while costs for fertilizer, fuel and machinery have barely declined.
Spain mobilizes military to control swine fever outbreak
Spanish authorities mobilized members of the country’s military emergency unit alongside Catalan police and rural wardens to locate and remove animals potentially infected with African swine fever after two wild boar found dead tested positive for the disease.
The outbreak threatened foreign sales of pork. China, however, on Monday said Spain could resume pork exports to the country from regions unaffected by the outbreak, Reuters reported. Spain is the European Union’s largest pork producer, responsible for around a quarter of the bloc’s sales, with annual exports of around 3.5 billion euros, or $4.05 billion.
Spain had halted all pork shipments to China on Friday as a precaution, the report said. Authorities said two wild boar found dead had tested positive for the disease, which was last recorded in Spain in 1994. The report said officials suspect the virus may have spread after a wild boar ate contaminated food, possibly a sandwich brought from outside Spain.