Food prices will extend gains even as harvests expand, as exporters need to rebuild stockpiles, tightening global supplies and driving corn, wheat and soybeans higher, UBS AG said.
Corn may advance to $8.30 a bushel, 15 percent higher than yesterday’s close, Dominic Schnider, director for wealth management research at UBS, said in an interview. Wheat may jump 23 percent to $10 a bushel, while soybeans may surge 7.6 percent to $15 a bushel, he said.
“We need to have at least two or three years of good harvests” to rebuild stockpiles, Schnider said in Singapore yesterday. “We expect food prices to trend higher. At one point, it will come off in 2012,” he said, predicting a peak this year.
The global food price index, compiled by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, surged to a record for a second month in January, driven by higher prices of cereals, dairy and sugar. Extending those gains may push millions more people into extreme hunger and poverty, prompting governments to pay more for food subsidies, widening national budget deficits.
Food prices are at “dangerous levels” after pushing 44 million people into poverty since June, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said Feb. 15. That adds to the more than 900 million people around the world who go hungry each day, he said.
Corn Stocks
Global corn stocks will slide for the third consecutive season in the year through June 2012 as record world production won’t be enough to satisfy rising demand, the International Grains Council forecast last month.
Inventories were forecast to decline further from a four- year low of 119 million tons at the end of June this year, the council said. It lowered its estimate for this season by 1 million tons from a previous forecast because of demand from U.S. ethanol makers.
Strong ethanol demand in the U.S. will continue to drain supply of corn, and prices of the grain would need to rise to $8.30 a bushel to squeeze margins by makers of the fuel additive and ration demand, Schnider said. Corn for May delivery was little changed at $7.2075 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 11:37 a.m. Singapore time, narrowing a 0.5 percent loss earlier. It reached a record $7.9925 a bushel on June 27, 2008.
About 43 percent, or 4.95 billion bushels of the 11.6 billion bushels of corn demand in the U.S., the world’s largest grower, user and exporter, is for ethanol use, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate on Feb. 9.
Demand for corn from U.S. ethanol makers is forecast to gain this season from 4.57 billion bushels a year ago, according to USDA data. Demand climbed after the nation’s Environmental Protection Agency agreed in January to let refiners increase the corn-based fuel additive in gasoline to as much as 15 percent, from 10 percent for vehicles of 2001 model-year and later.
‘Demand Rationing’
“The focus lies in demand rationing,” Schnider said. “Which demand will give in? It’s not going to be the consumption of food items. It’s going to be ethanol.”
Wheat futures may surge to as high as $10 a bushel if Russia maintains its export ban and China becomes a net importer of the cereal this year, he said.
Russia’s wheat stockpiles were forecast by the USDA to plunge to 3.87 million tons before this year’s harvest, from 11.87 million tons a year earlier. Its coarse-grain stockpiles, which include all cereals except for rice and wheat, were estimated to fall to 1.36 million tons, from 2.89 million tons a year ago, and 4.8 million tons in the 2008-2009 season, according to USDA data.
The worst drought in at least 50 years in China’s wheat- growing regions may curb the nation’s yields, Weather Trends International said. That may push the Asian nation to become a net wheat importer, intensifying competition for U.S. supplies, Schnider said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Luzi Ann Javier in Singapore at ljavier@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Poole at jpoole4@bloomberg.net
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