CANADA: The weak shipping market came to the aid of French merchants’ drive to find buyers for the country’s bumper wheat crop, helping win the biggest export order in seven months from Egyptian grain officials.
Gasc, the grain authority for Egypt, the top wheat importing nation, bought 240,000 tonnes on wheat on Wednesday, taking the total it has bought at tender so far in 2015-16, which started in July, to 2.8m tonnes.
Wednesday’s order – costing nearly $50m including shipping, taking the total that Gasc has spent this season to some $580m – included 120,000 tonnes of French wheat, the biggest order at tender from the European Union’s biggest wheat exporting country since April.
Gasc also bought one cargo of Romanian wheat, and one cargo of Russian origin.
However, French wheat was rendered the most competitive at the tender by a slim margin, of some $0.40 a tonne including freight, by an unusually low shipping charge – a reflection of the unusually weak dry bulk market.
