U.S. hard red spring wheat shipments increase to China

U.S. hard red spring wheat shipments increase to China    China’s purchases of U.S. hard red spring wheat have reached about 11 million bushels in the 2003-2004 marketing year, the biggest volume since 1991-1992, and a large jump from 1.7 million bushels last year.
   Most of the U.S. hard red spring wheat sales have been to the China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Import & Export Corp. (COFCO), and the company has already contracted for another 2.6 million bushels of hard red spring wheat for export in the 2004-2005 marketing year. About 3 million bushels of U.S. spring wheat were sold to independent Chinese buyers.
   North Dakota and Montana farmers will supply China with most of the wheat. According to the North Dakota Wheat Commission, many milling companies were previously not familiar with the quality of U.S. spring wheat exported from the Pacific Northwest. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when China had high imports of wheat, U.S. spring wheat shipped from the Gulf was not as clean or dry as that available today from western U.S. growing areas, the commission said.
   U.S. wheat farmers have also made a better effort to market themselves directly to Chinese flour mills. “In previous decades, when China purchased wheat from the United States, price was given far greater consideration than quality, so they tended to purchase large quantities of hard and soft red winter wheat,” said Neal Fisher, administrator of the North Dakota Wheat Commission.
   In the fall of 2003, just before China’s domestic wheat prices started to rise to match international market values, a group of U.S. mills put together a shipload of wheat of 14.5 percent protein content. This was the second time a group of mills used their tariff-rate quota allocation to buy U.S. spring wheat under China’s accession agreement to the World Trade Organization.