Global economy worried that corn prices continue to fall

Beijing De Runlin March 17 news: March 16th, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn market closed down, mainly due to the global nuclear crisis caused by the Japanese nuclear leak crisis, prompting the bulls to continue to close out.

At the close, the May contract fell 19.50 cents to close at 616.50 cents per bushel; the intraday May contract fell to its lowest level in nine weeks. However, the December contract rose slightly by 1.25 cents to close at 549.25 cents per bushel.

The corn market rebounded in the morning, but the EU Energy Commissioner said that the situation in Japan has been out of control, causing the US stock market to suddenly fall, dragging the corn market down quickly.

Affected by arbitrage trading, the December corn contract barely closed higher. The private agency expects that the US corn planting area in 2011 will be lower than the government’s recent forecast of 92 million acres, which supports forward contracts.

Analysts said that the US corn futures market continued the recent decline because investors are still worried about the global economy slowing down. Japan’s earthquake and nuclear leakage crisis threatened Japan’s economic development and continued to drag down the agricultural product market.

Analysts said that since the corn futures price reached the highest level in 32 months on March 4, 2011, the corn market has been suppressed by the long-term liquidation of commodity funds. Commodity funds sold out 40,000 contracts.

The macroeconomic situation is worrisome, coupled with long sell-offs, causing the corn market to plummet again. Corn prices have fallen by nearly $1.34, or about 18%, over the past nine trading days.

Although corn exports to Japan will decline before the Japanese farming industry recovers, the market is obviously more suppressed by technical selling and long open positions. The weaker stock market has exacerbated the negative atmosphere in the agricultural product market.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the US ethanol production was 895,000 barrels a day in the week ending March 11, which was a 1.36% increase from the previous week and 5.67% higher than the same period of last year. Inventory was 19.905 million barrels, an increase of 0.16% from a week ago and 1.09% higher than the same period of last year.

In other news, South Korea purchased 110,000 tons of corn and 110,000 tons of soybean meal.

Spot dealers said that the recent plunge in corn prices has caused farmers to slow their sales.

On March 16, the corn market was estimated at 565,593 lots.