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Home / Bioethanol / News Kazakhstan sees record grain crop, exports
By Robin Paxton and Raushan Nurshayeva ASTANA, Nov 27 (Reuters) — Kazakhstan's 2007 grain harvest will rise 22 percent to a post-Soviet record of 20.1 million tonnes and the country will export about half this amount in the current marketing season, a senior government official said on Tuesday. Vice-Minister for Agriculture Akylbek Kurishbayev said Kazakhstan would ship grain to at least 44 countries this season as it seeks to carve a share of alternative export markets in the Middle East, North Africa, western Europe and China. «Our export potential for this year is 10 million tonnes,» Kurishbayev told Reuters in an interview. «The main destination will be our traditional markets in the CIS, but we're looking further afield—Egypt, Iran, Italy, Norway, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey.» Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country of 15 million people covering an area five times the size of France, aims to become one of the world's top five grain exporters within the next few years. This season's exports are forecast to set a new record, surpassing the 9 million tonnes shipped in 2006-07. Kazakh wheat, known for its high quality, could help meet a global shortage resulting from drought in major grain-growing countries and the growing use of food crops in biofuel production. Kazakhstan has 22.9 million tonnes of grain available for the 2007-08 marketing year, including the 2007 harvest and stocks carried over from the previous season, data prepared for Reuters by the Agriculture Ministry showed. Of this, 10 million tonnes will be exported, 9.3 million tonnes consumed by the domestic market and 3.6 million tonnes carried over to next season. Kurishbayev said new export terminals constructed by the state-owned Food Contract Corporation would help Kazakhstan overcome logistical problems — vast distances to port and rail tariffs on deliveries via Russia — that reduce the competitiveness of Kazakh exports. He said Kazakhstan could ship 1.5 million tonnes of grain annually, bypassing Russia, through a network of ports on the Caspian and Black Seas. A new terminal planned for China could add another 2 million tonnes a year of exports in an eastern direction. He did not say when these volumes might be realised. EXPORT LICENCES Kurishbayev said new export licensing rules introduced in September had not interrupted exports and served only to make shipments more transparent. Under the new rules, a trading company seeking an export licence must prove it has been active for at least a year without any overdue tax payments or debts. «All those who approached us to get licences received licences,» the deputy minister said. He said investment in the sector and better technology — 40 percent of the sown area this year was harvested by modern farm equipment — would allow Kazakhstan to increase its crop in the long term, although the weather would still be a factor. He declined to give an exact forecast for the 2008 crop but said the sown area would be greater and, regardless of the weather, the harvest would be no lower than the 15.5 million tonnes averaged over the last five years. «And if the weather is favourable, we'll harvest more,» he said in his office in the Kazakh capital, where a gold-framed portrait of President Nursultan Nazarbayev hangs on the wall.
The ministry forecasts a 20 percent increase in investment in the agricultural sector this year from the 47.1 billion tenge ($390.6 million) invested in 2006. About 60 percent was financed by farms themselves and 40 percent was supplied by the state budget, foreign investors and other lenders. (Writing by Robin Paxton, Editing by Peter Blackburn)
Date: 27.11.2007 Leave your comment
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