Food & Agribusiness
Our strategic knowledge supports international sugar traders, local exporters and importers, sugar beet processors, independent refiners of raw cane sugar, food and beverage manufacturers, and food retailers.
Meet the sector team
Voluntary sustainability standards in agriculture are growing in number and coverage. With governments under both global and local pressure to act on a spectrum of sustainability issues, and the consumer just a click away from how and where products are grown, sustainability is an issue that is increasingly entrenched in growing food and fibre in Australia.
World market prices are at their lowest levels in years, despite the fact that it is widely expected that the Centre/South will make a radical swing in the mix away from sugar in 2018/19. Our own preliminary take on the numbers is that the cane crop will reach 585m tonnes, at slightly less than 134kg of ATR (total recoverable sugars) per tonne cane. With 41.5% of that cane used to produce sugar (versus 46.7% in 2017/18), the region’s sugar output would be 30.9m tonnes – close to a 5.0m tonne reduction year-on-year.
The first quarter of 2018 has seen a significant ramp-up in projected global sugar production for the 2017/18 (Oct/Sept) international crop year. In Asia, both the Indian and Thai harvests have been revised higher. In India´s case, the official projection of sugar production from the Indian Sugar Millers´ Association, ISMA, was raised by over 3.0 million tonnes in early March, which promptly pushed New York raw sugar futures (basis May) below USc 13.0/lb. Since then, the progress of the Thai harvest has also prompted a substantial (close to 1.0m tonnes in our case) upward revision of output.
In response to the WTO’s allegation of Thailand’s subsidy on exports through a...
Latest progress report for the 2017/18 CS harvest, second half of September...
RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness