Canada: Chinese demand for Canadian wheat and malting barley will continue to grow, Canadian Wheat Board chief executive officer Adrian Measner told farmers at a wheat board accountability meeting in Oak Bluff. "On the Canadian side (of Chinese imports) they've been focusing on the high quality," Measner said in an interview. Farmers at the meeting were surprised to hear that China was not just a buyer of bulk wheat. Measner said the country has been rapidly developing and now wants top quality malting barley for its beer exports, The Western Producer revealed on February 20.

The Tsingtao brewery claims that half of its malting barley is Canadian, showing that Canadian grain has developed a fashionable international reputation. China has occasionally been a big buyer of Canadian grain, but it has also often left the market. Early this decade, China's imports of Canadian wheat were below levels commonly set in the 1990s.

Measner said China will become a more dependable buyer as its population increases, its people begin to demand higher value products and its farmland is slowly swallowed up by urban development. Unlike Brazil, which has large amounts of uncropped land that can be opened to production, China's arable acreage has been fully used for many years, and a more likely Chinese trend will be the removal of marginal land from production. "There isn't that extra land to open up there," Measner said.

As China's 1.3 billion population increases to an expected 1.5 billion by 2017, the country will lose farmland and become thirstier for beer. If every Chinese adult drank one more bottle of beer per year, Chinese malting barley demand would increase by 370,000 tonnes, Measner said. The country now imports about two million tonnes of malting barley a year, of which Canada has supplied as much as 730,000 tonnes.

Measner said the wheat board wants to capture the high end of the Chinese market by not only supplying the best grain but also by having customers who want to brag about it being Canadian. Branding is going to be more important in the future, Measner said, and the board hopes "Canada" will become synonymous with "quality." "It's the wave of the future," he said.

25 February, 2004