IARN — The wild week of U.S. export news continued Friday morning when China made another massive purchase of U.S. corn.
Allendale Commodities Broker Greg McBride tells the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network that a flash sale at 8 a.m. Friday showed China purchased over 2 million metric tons of corn for the 2020/2021 marketing year.
“It’s the second largest corn sale that we’ve ever seen,” McBride said. “It was 2.108 million metric tons to China. That is old crop corn. That equates to about 80-85 million bushels. This is a continuation of what we’ve been seeing all week. We now have about 5.7 million metric tons that we’ve sold to China this week.”
“We had heard earlier this month and last month that (China) was looking for another 10 million metric tons on top of what they had already purchased,” McBride continued. “Now, here just this week we have 5.7 million tons to add onto it.”
On Tuesday, China bought 1.36 million tons of corn, followed by another 680,000 metric tons on Wednesday. Thursday was much of the same as China purchased 1.7 million tons of old crop corn. A Bloomberg article noted that China is buying up record amounts of U.S. corn to feed a hog herd recovering from African swine flu.
“They actually do need this corn,” McBride said. “It’s not just them hoarding as we’ve seen in the past. In the past 5-to-10 years, they have decreased their acreage of corn and their stocks have started to dwindle. They have had two years in a row where they have had production issues and that continues to create this deficit of what they produce versus what they actually use.”
Also announced on Friday’s daily wire, China bought 132,000 metric tons of soybeans for the 2021/2022 marketing year.
Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network
