There would be an easy way to make Ana Olga Gerente Rodriguez happier about Canadian durum.
“Lower the prices, lower the prices,” she said, laughing, when asked about how to improve Canadian grain.
Interviews with Rodriguez, a Colombian durum miller and pasta maker, and Guillermo Francos, a Mexican brewer, showed that some buyers of Canadian grain are suffering because of high world prices and premiums for Canadian product.
But neither sounded like they were getting ready to dump Canada as a supplier.
“The price is up to the clouds,” said Francos of Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma in Monterey, which makes Corona beer.
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“Our production cost has been rising rapidly because of that.”
Francos and Rodriguez were interviewed during brewing and milling programs at the Canadian International Grains Institute in Winnipeg.
Francos said his company is unable to increase beer prices by as much as input prices have increased. Competition between the two national Mexican brewing companies is too intense to allow prices to increase by more than about four percent per year.
That’s a problem for him because crop prices have increased 30 to 40 percent in the last year. He’s perplexed by the strength of barley prices because unlike last year, when many world crops had severe problems or short crops, this year only parts of Europe have major problems.
“This year prices remain high and are going up, and for us it’s quite un-understandable,” Francos said.
He expects things to get worse as new crops come to market, but then ease.
“Everybody’s inventories are low,” he said.
“At the beginning, all the companies are going to be trying to raise inventories, so the situation is going to get quite tight, but other than that I think things are going to be more normal in shipments and, I hope, in prices.”
Rodriguez said high quality durum is hard to lock down.
“Lately it has been very expensive and very difficult to get this high quality wheat,” she said.
“We think the Chinese or Americans are paying a high premium to get this wheat.”
Rodriguez’s company uses only Canadian durum.
“It is a lot more expensive than the American wheat (but) we like the quality of the Canadian durum wheat.”
To get a marketing payback for the expensive grain, her company advertises that its premium quality pasta uses Canadian grain.
Francos said his company buys malting barley from Canada, the United States and Europe. He thinks he won’t have trouble getting Canadian or other malting barley in the fall and winter.
“Product availability is not going to be any concern,” he said.
The challenge will be figuring out what he’ll pay for it because Canadian barley marketers are not offering prices to buyers as a result of the political and legal battle over whether the Canadian Wheat Board should maintain its monopoly on malting barley sales in the new crop year.
“We don’t know what to expect from Canadian offers, because we don’t have any at this time,” Francos said.
“It’s a big uncertainty for us.”
