EU: For barley the main producing areas are in the EU-15. Here, there are ample intervention storage facilities, especially since rye is no longer eligible for intervention, and farmers have less need for operating cash from these sales because of government payments. However, large supplies of feed-quality wheat are available from a record crop, displacing barley and depressing feed grain prices, which in turn makes intervention more attractive. In the past, the EU has often had 3-5 million tonnes of barley intervention stocks but these have been pulled down to virtually nothing this past year. Current offers are about 1.4 million tonnes, mostly from Germany, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) said on December 13.

18 December, 2004