Russian wheat exports fell 97 per cent last week after the country began taxing shipments in an effort to reduce domestic food prices.
Exports totaled 19,000 metric tons in the seven days to 11 February, Agriculture Ministry data showed today. That compares with 683,000 tons in the previous week, with the bulk of shipments occurring in the last few days of January, data show.
Russia, the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, decided in December to tax exports from February through June to protect domestic supplies as the ruble’s collapse made it attractive for farmers to sell the grain abroad. The Agriculture Ministry said last week that in the first half of this month it would make a proposal to the cabinet to either change or keep the levy.
“This situation says that there’s no point for the government in changing the duty, which brought the exports to an abrupt halt,” Vladimir Petrichenko, director general of market researcher ProZerno, said by phone from Moscow on Monday. “I’m not aware of any plans by companies to export Russian wheat in March.”
The tax is 15 per cent of a shipment’s total value, plus €7.50 ($8.56) a ton. The Agriculture Ministry on Monday declined to comment on its proposals to the cabinet. The country exported a total of 837,000 tons of wheat in February 2014, Petrichenko said.
President Vladimir Putin told regional leaders last month that they must watch food prices as the country heads toward a recession because of a rout in oil and the weakening currency.
The government is considering selling about a third of its milling wheat stockpiles to millers in Moscow at below-market prices, according to the Moscow-based Union of Flour Millers & Cereal Plants. Grain inventories at the city’s procurement and processing organizations declined 31 percent from a year earlier to 76,000 tons by 1 January, government data show.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
