MOSCOW, April 12 exports, said Albina Koryagina, partner of the NEO Center consulting company.
The world prices for sugar on the eve updated the maximum for the last 12 years: the cost of futures for white sugar on the London Stock Exchange reached 705.5 dollars per ton, and at the opening on Wednesday it was 706 dollars. The price rally is due to concerns about supply issues from Brazil, which may not be exporting as much as expected at the start of the season, Bloomberg wrote.
«The problem of using the already finite volumes of food products as a source of energy has been standing for twenty years already. The production of fuel from vegetable oils, grains, sugar cane and so on, against the backdrop of the fact that the growth of the world's population outpaces the growth of food production on a global scale — all this looks at least short-sighted,» Koryagina believes.
Meanwhile, she adds, due to both political and momentary economic benefits, this process will continue. «This is an objective world reality, which in another unimaginable way will again play into our hands. It is we who will be one of the beneficiaries of this unreasonable redistribution of resources on the planet. We can and must compensate for the drop in sugar supply on the world market,» the expert believes.
She noted that there is still export, but often these are low-added products — beet pulp, not sugar. In addition, there is a fundamental problem — total dependence on seed stock imports: at least 95% of sugar beet planting seeds are purchased abroad. But in the Russian Federation there is high-quality seed material of domestic production: according to Koryagina, the only problem is to replicate successful domestic developments through the development of a network of seed farms.
As for the domestic market, now sugar made from last year's and even the year before last's crops is being sold, and the price of sugar for the end consumer is relatively stable, she added, meanwhile noting the increase in wholesale prices at the moment. The production of white beet sugar in Russia in 2022 increased by 1.5%, to 6.02 million tons.