Soyabean production is recovering from drought challenges and flat demand in the 2020/21 marketing year, World Grain quoted from a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) report.
A 3% rise in soyabean planting area to 1.04M ha is forecast for the period, according to the Global Agricultural Information Network (GAIN) report, making it the second consecutive year that planted area exceeded 1M ha.
The increase in planted area was due to a combination of higher prices and demand for GM-free soyabeans, World Grain wrote.
While the soyabean harvest would not be completed before the autumn of 2021, the USDA anticipated EU soyabean production in the 2021-22 marketing year to surge 10% compared to the previous year to 2.91M tonnes.
EU imports of soyabean in the period were expected to remain stable at 14.4M tonnes compared to the previous year but remain below the 2019/20 level of 15.15M tonnes, the report said.
Drought issues affected EU soyabean production in 2020/21, which slipped to 2.65M tonnes compared with 2.7M tonnes the previous year.
The USDA expected soyabean exports to decrease from a high of 19.5M tonnes in 2019/20 to 18.9M tonnes the following year.
High prices of soyabeans had negatively impacted crush margins, World Grain reported, with lower crush margins expected in the 2020/21 marketing year as meal prices had not increased as much as soyabean prices.
