USDA to alter monthly world grain supply/demand tables in May

The US Department of Agriculture will make slight alterations to its monthly world supply and demand reports starting in May that will highlight China's share of global wheat and rice stocks, a government spokesman said on Thursday. Starting with its May 10 report, the USDA will add a new line to its world balance tables for wheat and rice to show global beginning stocks, production, imports, domestic use, exports and ending stocks, after subtracting the amounts for China.
A USDA official said in an email to Reuters that the government was making the changes "to better reflect recent global production, consumption, and trade trends for wheat, coarse grains and rice." The USDA's World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports, released on or around the 10th of each month, set the tone for global grain markets and often jolt Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn, wheat and soybean futures.
The reports detail the USDA's official crop production and usage estimates for the United States as well as other major global producers. The USDA in its April 10 WASDE report projected stocks of wheat remaining at the end of the 2017-18 marketing year at 271 million tonnes worldwide, an all-time high. China's ending stocks, at 127 million tonnes, represented almost half the total.
Since China exports only a small fraction of its wheat supply - expected at 1 million tonnes in 2017-18 - some analysts believed the USDA's global stocks figure gave a potentially misleading impression of abundance. "The inclusion of Chinese fundamentals makes it look like the world is awash in wheat, whereas the reality is that it is not, when you look at the fundamental structure for the realistically available supply," said Dale Durchholz, senior market analyst with Illinois-based Agrivisor.
The USDA will also move Russia and Ukraine to its list of "Major Exporters" on WASDE's world balance tables for wheat, corn and coarse grains. Russia is projected as the world's biggest wheat exporter in the 2017-18 marketing year. The USDA will remove its listings on those tables for the "FSU-12," its term for the states of the former Soviet Union except Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.