A country that emerged last year as a competitor for Canadian pea export markets will be performing a disappearing act this year.
The poor harvest conditions that turned a lot of France’s wheat crop into feed wheat has also devastated much of the nation’s forecast 2.3 million tonne pea crop.
“I guess it started raining just before harvest and continued for two to three weeks,” said Eric Fossay, a special crops trader for Agricore.
Last year, France sold 250,000 tonnes of yellow peas to India, Bangladesh and Cuba. This year, it has canceled up to 100,000 tonnes of new-crop sales to those three countries, said Fossay.
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“Reports I’ve heard is they’ve got sprouted, moulded, mildewed and stained peas, which are not suitable for human consumption, so a lot of these sales have been cancelled or washed back.”
That’s good news for Canadian pulse growers who seeded a record 3.13 million acres of peas this year, up nearly 50 percent from 1999’s crop of 2.1 million acres.
“With the majority of these sales being canceled, that’s just more new- crop demand that’s going to flow to Canada,” said Fossay.
France is the second largest producer of peas in the world, running a distant second to Canada. This year, a lot of French growers turned from peas to cereals, resulting in a 130,000-acre drop in the nation’s pea crop.
The reduced acreage in France combined with the poor harvest means Canada will recapture nearly all of its edible pea markets in India, Bangladesh and Cuba, where French exporters had made significant inroads.
Lower production expected
Special crops analyst Brian Clancey said the poor French harvest is good news for Canadian producers, but most forecasters have already factored a smaller French crop into their price calculations.
Picking up an extra 100,000 tonnes of export sales is nothing to sneeze at, but this year’s pea crop is expected to come in at just over three million tonnes, up about one million tonnes from last year.
“What we really need is to get the hog feeders in North America to recognize that peas are an economical alternative to soybean meal and that has not happened yet to the extent we want,” said the publisher of STAT, a special crops markets newsletter.
About 300,000 tonnes of last year’s crop were sold domestically as feed. Another 670,000 tonnes were exported as feed and 1.1 million tonnes were exported as edible product or food peas.
Clancey said one drawback of the poor quality French crop is that there may be a weak European Union demand for Canadian feed peas. Europe buys all of Canada’s feed pea exports.
He said harvest rains in Europe may have damaged quality, but it’s unlikely they affected yield so France could be sitting on a large feed pea crop.
Fossay said some analysts also believe the abundance of cheap EU feed wheat may displace peas from livestock rations.
But he thinks the outlook for Canadian feed pea exports to Europe can best be described as “a question mark.”
His contacts there are telling him some of the French pea crop isn’t even suitable for animal consumption. And the Europeans severely cut back on their pea acreage this year.
He thinks the shortfall in European peas will increase Canadian feed exports to Spain and northern Europe, the two regions that bought 99 percent of last year’s exports.
