China is likely to have a corn surplus of 4.48 million tonnes in the current marketing year, making it unlikely the country will import a large quantity of the grain, an executive from Jilin Grain Group (JGG) said on Monday.
"There is little possibility for China to import a large quantity of corn in the near future, though there might be a small amount of imports," Jiang Jian Hua, vice chairman of JGG, said in a speech prepared for delivery at a conference later on Monday.
He said China would also have a corn surplus of 2 million tonnes in the next marketing year, starting in October, as a result of Beijing's policy to rein in the corn processing industry. State-owned JGG, based in China's top corn producing province of Jilin, is one of the country's two authorised corn exporters.
Alarmed by a rise in domestic corn prices that climbed to record highs and also helped to push up pork prices, Beijing has introduced a series of measures to curb domestic demand from the corn processing industry, including the ethanol sector. Jiang put China's 2006/2007 domestic demand at 141 million tonnes, compared with the harvest of 145.5 million tonnes.
He saw the domestic demand rising to 145 million tonnes in the next marketing year, although it would still be below a record output of 147 million tonnes expected in the 2007/2008 year. Jiang said China had sold about 1 million tonnes for export so far this year at prices above $200 a tonne, free-on-board. He did not say whether Beijing would hand out the second batch of 2007 export quotas after releasing the first batch of about 1.4 million tonnes.
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