StatCan Dec 31 Stocks Report Meets Trade Expectations

Statistics Canada released its December 31st ending stocks report on Tuesday.

Neil Townsend is Chief Market Analyst with FarmLink Marketing Solutions.

"It's hard to read too much into it, but I mean there are some trade expectations and the only notable one where they were sort of a little bit out of line with what happened was they were higher on the all wheat non-durum number then what the actual number came out at. The number came out lower than they expected, but I would say that was inline with what the production drop was. We had the production drop year on year by 34 per cent for non-durum wheat and stocks were 34 per cent tighter than you would have expected them to be."

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada says as of December 31st, canola stocks were down 43.1% year over year to 7.6 million tonnes, their lowest level since 2007.

"That's certainly well within the line of what we were expecting," commented Townsend. "The bottom line is this, there's seven months left in the marketing year, as of that report, typically we'd be using somewhere around 1.5 million tonnes of canola between domestic usage and export and we have 7.6 million tonnes left. Yes, I think there's been a bit of rationing, certainly on the export side, and to a smaller degree on the domestic side, but I mean it's very, very tight."

On-farm canola stocks fell 50.8% to 5.6 million tonnes, offsetting commercial stocks, which rose 4.3% to 1.9 million tonnes. The decline in on-farm stocks was largely attributable to low total supply.

Despite strong international demand, canola exports fell 43.1% compared with one year earlier.