Domestic grain consumption in the 2019/20 season will decrease by almost 1 million tons to 78.4 million tons, the general director of the analytical company ProZerno Vladimir Petrichenko said at the X industry business conference Russian Crop Production - 2019/20. Such dynamics will be caused by wheat, whose consumption is expected to decrease by 3 million tons to 42.4 million tons, while barley consumption will increase by 1.5 million tons to 14.9 million tons, and corn by 0.5 million tons to 9.1 million tons.
According to Petrichenko, a decrease in consumption will occur due to a decrease in demand from the livestock industry. "If earlier [in animal husbandry] consumption was either stable or grew a little, then this season, we believe, it will decrease, although not very significantly," Petrichenko said. So, he noted, the number of poultry in the past season fell below 2017, and now it is even smaller. "And we see this also in the production of meat: if it grows up, it’s quite a bit due to pig production, while the production of poultry is reduced," Petrichenko said.
In addition, there is a trend towards a gradual decrease in grain consumption and for food purposes, the president of the Russian Grain Union Arkady Zlochevsky added. "There is a decrease in the volume of demand for bakery products. Small, but it is," Zlochevsky said. He recalled that usually a fall in population incomes, on the contrary, causes an increase in demand for bread. "However, this season is already declining. There was a spike in income associated with a drop in income, but still, the paradigm for healthy consumption has its effect," Zlochevsky said. According to his forecast, a decrease in demand for bakery products and, accordingly, for food grain within the country will continue to be observed.
Grain harvest this season is projected at the level of 121 - 122 million tons (including 75 million tons of wheat). As a result, the export potential this season, according to ProZerno, is 45.7 million tons compared to 44 million tons in 2018/19. Of these, 35 million tons will be in wheat. "That is, wheat will almost repeat the last year’s result with an increase in [export] of barley and corn," Petrichenko said. The final reserves at the end of the 2019/20 season will amount to 13 million tons against 15.2 million tons a year earlier, the expert calculated. The Russian Grain Union estimates shipments of grain from Russia abroad this season at 47 million tons.
Based on piginfo.ru.
