Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Black Sea agribusiness news; drop the dead donkey

A return to work for many this week, nursing hangovers and that dreaded back to school feeling that even as fully formed adults we can never quite manage to shrug off, while trying to access emails and websites with forgotten passwords and “where has the send button gone?” feeling of frustration.

Meanwhile the sensible people of Russia and Ukraine have just started their festive party season, writing off January preferring to stay indoors avoiding travelling or any excessive strain during the coldest part of the year.

To that end the agribusiness news out of the Black Sea region is fairly scant, mainly consisting of re-hashed stories, pre-Christmas press releases and an item about a donkey.

The EU officially renewed sanctions against Russia for six months until July 31, 2017.

Ukraine exported record volume of grains in 2016, up 13% compared with the previous year while the Ministry of Agriculture raised its grain export forecast for the current marketing year from 40.2mmt to 41.6mmt due to increased corn export estimates.  

The corn export forecast was increased from 17.2mmt to 18.5mmt.

Belarus 2016 milk production was an all-time record for the landlocked country who were able to satisfy domestic requirement and export to Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, Bulgaria, Serbia, Israel and the US.

Kazakhstan grain production reached 23.7mmt, almost 4.0mmt more than the previous year which will allow for export levels up to 9.0mmt while the state set goals of increasing crop production by 30%.

A farm in northern Serbia produces cheese made from donkey milk that costs €1,000 per kilogram because there are only 100 Balkan donkeys that can be milked for cheese and each jenny is hand-milked three times a day.

A Russian energy company is negotiating to purchase the farm for an estimated at €1 million.