Russia may lift grain export ban this year

Russia may lift its ban on grain exports earlier than 2012 if it revises its cereal supply estimates upwards, a leading Russian analyst said on Tuesday. Russia was hit by a severe drought last summer and originally imposed the ban from August 15, 2010 to July 1, 2011. Officials have since said the ban may be extended until 2012.
"It looks like the government has started to understand that we may have sufficient grain," Andrei Sizov, chief executive and president of agricultural analysts SovEcon, told Reuters. "It does not mean that exports will restart from July 1 but the government may examine the availability of grain not at the end of the year, but much earlier."
Russia had grain stocks of 26.2 million tonnes as of April 1, which was down by 6.7 million tonnes or 20.4 percent from a year earlier, data by the official government statistics office Rosstat, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, showed. Rosstat data is not wholly reliable, Sizov said, as Rosstat gives only estimated figures for medium and large farms employing over 100 people.
"Data for small farms are supplied by regional statistic offices and one can only guess how they make these calculations," he said. Sizov said that as a result Rosstat had recalculated its estimate for domestic grain consumption in the 2010 calendar year three times - first up to 77 million tonnes from 73 million and then back down to 72 million.
The calendar year is different from the crop year, which starts on July 1. For the 2011 calendar year Rosstat cut consumption to 67 million tonnes from 72 million, Sizov said. "Therefore it means that some additional 5 million tonnes of grain may became available to the market (in 2010/11 crop year)." Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has recently said that Russia must restore its credibility as a grain supplier, but he did not say when the ban may be lifted.
Russia's official 2011 crop forecast is 85-90 million tonnes. The Russian Grain Union industry lobby has said that exports could restart if Russia harvested 85 million tonnes. The lobby has also asked the government to open exports for export-oriented southern regions, which were unable to dispose of its huge stocks otherwise due to underdeveloped infrastructure.