Australia

The USDA attaché in Canberra pegged Australia’s 2025/26 wheat crop at 36 million tonnes, up from their estimate of 34.11 million the previous year. The Canberra desk based the increase on above normal rainfall in July and August. If the estimate holds, that will make for Australia’s third largest wheat harvest on record.

That increase in production is to push up ending stocks to 4.88 million tonnes from 4.65 million in 2024/25.

Turkey

It’s a different course for the Turkish wheat crop, with the attaché in Ankara forecasting 16.30 million tonnes, compared to 19 million in 2024/25. The attaché said the decline is due to unseasonably dry conditions in the country.

Turkish wheat ending stocks are to fall to 2.27 million tonnes from 3.42 million the previous year.

Kazakhstan

Wheat production in Kazakhstan was projected to pull back as well, the attaché in Astana forecast. However, the main impetus for the decline is that farmers have shifted away from cereals to more profitable oilseeds.

The 2025/26 wheat harvest was projected to be 15.50 million tonnes, down one million from the year before. Ending stocks are to slide to 1.20 million tonnes from 1.95 million.

South Africa

In South Africa, its white and yellow corn crops were forecast to glean a total of 16 million tonnes, down 946,000 tonnes from 2024/25, the USDA attaché in Pretoria said.

Strong prices led to more corn grown in 2024/25, but they have since pulled back, although favourable moisture conditions have been beneficial to the 2025/26 crop.

South African corn ending stocks are to shrink by 400,000 tonnes at 1.80 million.

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All Safe Food for Canadians (SFC) licence holders who are slaughtering poultry are expected to implement the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program by Dec. 1, 2025. Currently, the scope of this program is limited to poultry carcasses.

WHY IT MATTERS: The CFIA’s new policy comes into force Dec. 1, 2025, for Canada’s poultry sector.

Live birds bring a load of pathogens in the intestine to the slaughter process. Every stage from the hanging of the carcass in live receiving to its entrance into the chiller has the potential to influence the microbial load on the final product.

Monitoring the microbial load at a defined point before carcasses are in their pre-chill mode allows for a more precise evaluation of contamination control measures applied during the dressing and evisceration stages.

Data generated through the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program is intended to drive science-based decisions within an operator’s food safety system to optimize interventions and enhance food safety. This information will empower license holders to verify the effectiveness of their control measures, validate the impact of process changes and optimize interventions, including microbial interventions, equipment sanitation protocols and adjustments to evisceration techniques. License holders will also be able to demonstrate ongoing compliance with the Preventive Control Plan requirements under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations. When operators establish their internal performance baseline using pre-chill microbiological monitoring data, they will be able to allow businesses to track their own performance over time, identify shifts in process control and pursue improvement initiatives.

Pre-chill or early-stage microbiological monitoring can be integral components of comprehensive poultry safety management systems. Authorities like the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA FSIS) incorporate requirements for microbiological monitoring at various stages, including consideration of pre-chill data, to verify process control in poultry slaughter establishments.

The CFIA developed the following microbiological sampling measures to help food businesses comply with section 47 and 89 (1)(c) of the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations. The implementation of the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program supports direct compliance with hazard identification and analysis, which requires operators to identify and analyze biological hazards such as indicator organisms that reflect potential fecal or environmental contamination, which can pose a risk to the contamination of food.

Operators are also required to follow hazard control measures to prevent, eliminate and reduce identified hazards to an acceptable level using control measures shown by evidence to be effective. The pre-chill microbiological monitoring program is a tool to generate such evidence for controls applied during evisceration and dressing.

The Preventative Control Plan must be written and include a description of identified biological hazards, the control measures used to address them and evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of those control measures. The pre-chill microbiological monitoring program results contribute directly to fulfilling this evidence.

The microbiological monitoring of poultry carcasses at pre-chill locations and comparison with post-chill locations will specifically help demonstrate that contamination is effectively minimized through evisceration and dressing process.

Operators can use sampling and testing procedures developed by provincial counterparts, industry associations, international partners or academic bodies if they can achieve the same outcome. The guidance must be tailored to a particular business, product or products and market requirements. The process must also meet foreign country requirements.

The pre-chill microbiological monitoring program should be integrated to the Preventative Control Plan supporting the Process Verification Monitoring Program for general E.coli- Biotype I for raw poultry as a complement, not a duplicate. The implementation of the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program should leverage the Process Verification Monitoring Program including processes such as random sampling principles, record-keeping systems or corrective action framework. This will ensure consistency and efficiency and avoid unnecessary duplication.

There’s a distinction in the sampling point and primary focus; the Primary Verification Monitoring Program assesses the overall process outcome by testing carcasses after chilling, which shows the effects of slaughter, dressing and chilling interventions. In contrast, the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program provides specific verification data on the controls applied during evisceration and dressing by sampling before chilling. This paired sampling approach (pre-chill and post-chill) allows for a direct assessment of the microbial change occurring between these two important points.

Food businesses must comply with the law. They demonstrate compliance by ensuring commodities and processes they are responsible for demonstrate compliance. If a written Preventative Control Plan is required, the food business develops a Preventative Control Plan with supporting documents, monitors and maintains evidence of its implementation and verifies that all control measures are effective.

CFIA verifies the compliance of food businesses by inspection and sampling.

For producers who want to learn how to use the pre-chill microbiological monitoring program, they can learn more on the CFIA’s website.

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The agriculture ministry said it detected a new serotype of the disease that heightened the outbreak, due to animal movement after the Muslim religious holiday of Eid al Adha, which is typically marked by slaughtering livestock.

The decision was taken to prevent further spread as teams continue to vaccinate animals against the disease, the ministry said. It will gradually lift the restrictions once the entire livestock population is vaccinated.

The ministry also said the temporary closure will not disrupt supply and demand for meat and dairy products in Turkey.

— Reporting by Can Sezer

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Russia quit the deal in July — a year after it was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey — complaining that its own food and fertilizer exports faced serious obstacles.

Erdogan, who previously played a significant role in convincing Putin to stick with the deal, and the United Nations are both trying to get Putin to return to the deal.

“As Turkey, we believe that we will reach a solution that will meet the expectations in a short time,” Erdogan said in the Black Sea resort of Sochi after his first face to face meeting with Putin since 2022.

Erdogan said that Russia’s expectations were well-known to all and that the shortcomings should be eliminated, adding that Turkey and the United Nations had worked on a new package of suggestions to ease Russian concerns.

Erdogan said Ukraine should soften its negotiating position against Russia in talks over reviving the deal and export more grain to Africa rather than Europe.

“Ukraine needs to especially soften its approaches in order for it to be possible for joint steps to be taken with Russia,” he told reporters.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, speaking later on Ukrainian television, said Kyiv would not alter its stand, but would take note of Turkey’s account of the Sochi talks.

“We should not continue to be hostages to Russian blackmail, where Russia creates problems and then invites everyone to solve them,” Kuleba said.

“It is clear that we will stand in defence of all principled positions, especially regarding sanctions pressure on the Russian Federation.”

Standing beside Erdogan, Putin restated Russia’s position that it could return to the deal but only if the West stopped restricting Russian agricultural exports from reaching global markets. A separate memorandum agreed with the United Nations calls for conditions to facilitate Russia’s food and fertilizer exports.

Reviving the grain deal

“We will be ready to consider the possibility of reviving the grain deal and I told Mr. President about this again today — we will do this as soon as all the agreements on lifting restrictions on the export of Russian agricultural products are fully implemented,” Putin said.

He said Western claims that Russia had stoked a food crisis by suspending participation in the grain deal were incorrect as prices did not rise on its exit from the deal.

“There is no physical shortage of food,” Putin said.

While Russian exports of food and fertilizer are not subject to Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia exported record amounts of wheat last year, Moscow and agricultural exporters say restrictions on payments, logistics and insurance have hindered shipments.

“The West continues to block the supply of grain and fertilizers from the Russian Federation to world markets,” Putin said, adding that the West had “cheated” Russia over the deal because rich countries got more than 70% of the grain exported under the deal.

Russia and Ukraine are two of the world’s key agricultural producers, and major players in the wheat, barley, maize, rapeseed, rapeseed oil, sunflower seed and sunflower oil markets.

Putin said Russia expected a grain harvest of 130 million tonnes this year of which 60 million tonnes could be exported.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that he had sent Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “a set of concrete proposals” aimed at reviving the deal.

One of Moscow’s main demands is for the Russian Agricultural Bank to be reconnected to the SWIFT international payments system. The EU cut it off in June 2022 as part of sweeping sanctions imposed in response to the invasion.

Putin said that a plan to supply up to one million tonnes of Russian grain to Turkey at reduced prices for subsequent processing at Turkish plants and shipping to countries most in need was not an alternative to the grain deal.

He also said Russia was close to a deal with six African countries over a plan to supply Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea with up to 50,000 tonnes of grain each free of charge.

— Writing for Reuters by Guy Faulconbridge; additional reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne, Orhan Coskun and Ece Toksabay in Ankara and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations.

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Russia quit the deal in July — a year after it was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey — complaining that its own food and fertilizer exports faced obstacles and that not enough Ukrainian grain was going to countries in need.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Erdogan, who previously played a significant role in convincing Putin to stick with the deal, would hold talks with the Kremlin chief in Sochi on Monday but gave no further details.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu in Moscow on Friday to discuss grain ahead of the Erdogan meeting.

Shoigu said it was not Russia’s fault that the grain deal had failed and repeated the Russian position that Moscow would return to it if all the promises made to Russia were fulfilled.

“It’s not our fault today, but it’s stopped,” Shoigu said in a statement released by the defence ministry. “Here we can say only one thing, that if everything that was promised to Russia is fulfilled, the deal will be extended.”

“It turned out that it is more difficult to do this than to build new corridors, new ground routes,” said Shoigu, who attended the signing ceremony for the Black Sea deal in Istanbul in 2022.

The Black Sea grain deal was intended to combat a global food crisis that the United Nations said had been worsened by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which Russia calls a “special military operation”.

Moves are afoot to revive the deal.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday that he had sent Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “a set of concrete proposals” aimed at reviving a deal that allowed the safe export of Ukrainian grain via the Black Sea.

Turkey’s foreign minister said at a briefing in Moscow on Thursday that reviving the deal was important for the world.

U.S. wheat prices rose on Friday, though Lavrov said on Thursday that Russia saw no sign that it would receive the guarantees needed to revive the grain deal.

Lavrov said the West was hyping the talk of a global food crisis as prices remained around 2021 levels and had ignored Putin’s pledge to supply Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Eritrea with up to 50,000 tonnes of grain each free of charge.

To convince Moscow to approve the original deal, known by diplomats as the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a three-year accord was struck at the same time under which U.N. officials agreed to help Russia with its own food and fertilizer exports.

But Moscow said that memorandum had not been honoured due to the perfidy of the West.

Lavrov said he had discussed Putin’s initiative to supply up to one million tonnes of Russian grain to Turkey at reduced prices for subsequent processing at Turkish plants and shipping to countries most in need. That proposal is also being discussed with Qatar.

One of Moscow’s main demands is for the Russian Agricultural Bank to be reconnected to the SWIFT international payments system. The EU cut it off in June 2022.

While Russian exports of food and fertilizer are not subject to Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion, Moscow has said restrictions on payments, logistics and insurance have hindered shipments.

Two cargo vessels left a port near Odesa, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said Friday — the third and fourth to transit from deep-water Ukrainian ports through the Black Sea since Russia withdrew from the safe-passage deal.

— Guy Faulconbridge is the Moscow bureau chief for Reuters.

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Under the plan, Russia would send a million tons of grain to Turkey at a discounted price, with financial support from Qatar, to be processed in Turkey and sent to countries most in need, the foreign ministry said.

“We consider this project as the optimal working alternative to the Black Sea deal,” it said.

Russia pulled out last month from the year-old deal, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, that had enabled Ukraine to export grain from its Black Sea ports despite the war.

Since then, Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukrainian ports and grain stores, prompting Ukraine and the West to accuse it of using food as a weapon of war.

Russia says it quit the deal because too little of the grain was getting to the poorest countries, and because it still faces obstacles to the export of its own grain and fertilizer given that Western sanctions affect payments, insurance and port access.

Fidan is due in Moscow on Thursday and Friday to meet Lavrov, and the Kremlin said on Wednesday that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan would also visit Russia soon.

It was not clear what incentive Qatar would have to take part in the arrangement proposed by Russia, which since the collapse of the grain deal has also promised to supply quantities of free grain to six African countries.

The Russian statement said Lavrov would restate Moscow’s position that following the collapse of the grain deal, it would consider all ships heading to Ukraine as potentially carrying military cargo.

— Reporting for Reuters by Mark Trevelyan.

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The U.N. and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Russia and Ukraine in July 2022 to help alleviate a global food crisis worsened by Moscow’s invasion and blockade of Ukrainian ports. Ukraine and Russia are among the world’s leading grain exporters.

The EU is considering connecting a subsidiary of the Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) to the international payment network SWIFT to allow for grain and fertilizer transactions, sources familiar with discussions told Reuters on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres proposed in a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that Moscow allow the Black Sea grain deal to continue for several months to give the EU time to connect a Rosselkhozbank subsidiary to SWIFT, two of those sources familiar with discussions told Reuters.

During a visit to Brussels on Thursday, Guterres told reporters that he had not yet received a response from Russia. He said his letter to Putin contained “concrete proposals that I hope can allow us to find a positive way forward.”

According to TASS news agency, Putin said he had not seen the letter from Guterres proposing an extension of the deal, but said Russia was in contact with U.N. officials.

“We can suspend our participation in the deal, and if everyone once again says that all the promises made to us will be fulfilled, then let them fulfill this promise. We will immediately rejoin this deal,” he told Russian state television.

A Kremlin spokesman later said that Russia had not taken a final decision on whether to exit the grain deal.

EU ‘open to explore solutions’

The European Commission’s priority is to ensure that Ukrainian grain can reach the world market and it calls on all parties to extend the Black Sea deal, an EU spokesperson in Brussels said on Thursday.

“We are assisting the talks led by the U.N. and Turkey as required,” the spokesperson said. “We are of course open to explore all solutions that contribute to our objective, whilst continuing to ensure that Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine is hampered as much as possible.”

A key demand by Moscow is the reconnection of Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT. It was cut off by the EU in June 2022 over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen later on Thursday urged Putin to extend the deal. “The ball is in President Putin’s court and the world is watching,” she said.

Russia has threatened to ditch the Black Sea grain deal because several demands to dispatch its own grain and fertilizer abroad have not been met. The last ship traveling under the Black Sea agreement is currently loading its cargo at the Ukrainian port of Odesa ahead of the Monday deadline.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he spoke with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday and that they both agreed it was “vital” to extend the Black Sea deal.

“It is very important that there be no threat to food security anywhere in the world. And Russia must clearly realize that anyone who increases the threat of famine, particularly in critical areas of Africa, terrorizes the entire world with famine,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.

‘Ball in Russia’s court’

More than 32 million tonnes of corn, wheat and other grains have been exported by Ukraine under the arrangement. Russia has complained that not enough reaches poor countries, but the UN argues that it has benefited those states by helping lower food prices more than 20 per cent globally.

To convince Russia to agree to the Black Sea deal, a three-year memorandum of understanding was struck in July 2022 under which UN officials agreed to help Russia get its food and fertilizer exports to foreign markets.

While Russian exports of food and fertilizer are not subject to Western sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow says restrictions on payments, logistics and insurance have amounted to a barrier to shipments.

As a workaround to the lack of access to SWIFT, UN officials have got U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase to start processing some Russian grain export payments with reassurances from the U.S. government.

The UN is also working with the African Export-Import Bank to create a platform to help process transactions for Russian exports of grain and fertilizer to Africa, a UN trade official told Reuters last month.

— Reporting for Reuters by Michelle Nichols; additional reporting by Foo Yun Chee in Brussels and Ron Popeski.

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“The market is firm, it’s not going up or down,” said Jake Hansen of Mid-West Grain at Moose Jaw, Sask., noting there was not much buying or selling going on right now. He expected the rangebound trend would continue until the there was a better sense of production in Russia and Turkey.

Both countries are major chickpea growers, with harvests that come off before Canada’s. Turkey typically produces a good-quality chickpea crop, while Russia’s quality can be more hit-or-miss.

India is also a major world player in the world chickpea market, and anecdotal reports point to its recently harvested crop having good yields, but not the best quality, according to Hansen.

From a market perspective on the sell side, buyers are waiting to now how many acres went in the ground in Turkey, and what the potential quality is, said Hansen. The country grew an estimated 580,000 tonnes of chickpeas in 2022, according to government data.

Farmers in the U.S. intend to plant 340,500 acres of chickpeas this year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. That would be down slightly from the 353,100 acres seeded the previous year, when the country grew 186,000 tonnes of chickpeas.

Hansen noted chickpeas seeded in the U.S. generally end up in good shape, while Canada has more risk of frost. Early signs point to a good Canadian crop, but actual yields and quality will depend on weather through the growing season and at harvest.

Planted chickpea area in Canada is forecast at 260,200 acres by Statistics Canada, which would be up 11 per cent on the year, but still below the five-year average (2018-2022) of 318,000 acres. Average yields would see production of around 162,000 tonnes.

Most of Canada’s chickpeas are grown in Saskatchewan, where 25 per cent of intended acres were seeded as of Monday, according to the latest provincial crop report.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin is an associate editor/analyst with MarketsFarm in Winnipeg.

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The report, co-authored by research assistant Shawn Wiskar and centre director Guillaume Lhermie and released Thursday, used a focus group of six stakeholders in the Canadian poultry industry. It recommends several measures, primarily focused on increasing research and streamlining existing systems.

In its conclusion it states that “with the small size of Canadian poultry farms, expectations are placed unfairly on farmers across the country, creating regional strain and limiting the market’s ability to grow.”

Wiskar said the research for the report, which began last year, was “conceptualized out of an idea that it was really important for public policy to be built out of evidence-based and informed policy from producers.”

The think tank, which focuses on ag sector policy analysis and is based at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, “was really trying to function here as kind of a bridge-builder between the government of Canada as well as the government of Alberta and the producer groups,” he said.

The four main policy changes the report recommends are:

• an increase in provincially funded research;
• streamlining of the approval process for vaccines already approved in comparative markets;
• a comprehensive analysis of the poultry supply chains in other countries; and
• increased communication between poultry producers and the federal and provincial governments.

“We certainly hope at the very least this gets a conversation started between the producer groups and the government,” Wiskar said.

“The takeaway message from this report is that we think there is an increased need for efficiency in these markets, and the first step to that is improving communication between the different levels of government, the different commodity groups, as well the overarching marketing board.”

‘Barrier to entry’

Wiskar said that the poultry sector’s quota system was also a topic of concern for its focus group.

“Canadian poultry farms are a lot smaller, and their operations have to be smaller, due to the quota system, when you compare it to something like the beef sector, which doesn’t have that quota system.”

In the section on sector challenges, the report calls the quota system a “barrier to entry in the poultry sector, as farmers must bid to purchase a quota of production.”

The report said its focus group viewed Canada’s supply chain model as “posing the industry’s greatest challenges but also as providing its greatest support,” Participants cited the protection it provides from market fluctuations, but also its tight profit margins.

Wiskar said he didn’t think there was much in the report that would be unknown to producers or governments, but there is plenty the Canadian public could take away from it.

“It kind of seemed to us like the focus group we sat down with really thought that poultry was conceptualized by the public as being something more similar to what you might get out of the United States,” Wiskar said.

In Canada, he added, “poultry farming is a smaller operation, and it’s really bound up in supply management, which is not something that’s particularly well understood by the Canadian public.”

“The chicken farmers and the turkey farmers and the egg hatching farmers, they have different priorities, and they are functionally different industries, so it’s important not to group them all together.”

Asked for a review of the report, Chicken Farmers of Canada, for one, declined comment.

A CFC representative, noting the “limited sample size” of the report’s focus group, said Friday via email it could be misleading or “even risky” to draw conclusions from the report’s methodology.

Egg Farmers of Canada similarly said it had “no specific comment” on the report but also noted it was “based on a focus group that included a small sample of size of six agricultural stakeholders.”

The Simpson Centre is due to release a sister report on the challenges faced by the beef industry in several weeks.

— Jonah Grignon reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

Updated May 17, 2023 to include Egg Farmers of Canada comment.

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Russia has said it would not extend the pact beyond May 18 unless a list of demands is met to remove obstacles to its own grain and fertilizer exports. Cavusoglu was speaking to reporters on his return from a trip to Moscow.

He said the grain deal was among the issues he discussed with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov during the visit and that he hoped a positive result could be achieved in Istanbul, where talks were set to continue on Thursday.

“I think we can get a result to extend it for at least two more months,” Cavusoglu said.

The U.N. and Turkey brokered the Black Sea export agreement last July to help tackle a global food crisis that has been worsened by Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Officials from Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the U.N. make up a Joint Coordination Centre (JCC) in Istanbul, which implements the deal.

The United Nations said inspections resumed on Tuesday of outbound vessels under a deal allowing the safe Black Sea export of Ukraine grain. There were no inbound or outbound inspections of ships on Sunday or Monday.

— Reporting for Reuters by Daren Butler in Istanbul.

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