Two cargoes of French wheat have traded for April loading to Morocco as the lowest offer price shed $7/t on the day at Thursday's close.
Two Handysize cargoes traded in basis terms to Paris-listed wheat futures late on 27 March, traders said.
Various sellers had quoted French wheat for April loading cfr Casablanca at a €15-18/t premium to Euronext May futures, according to market participants from both the buy and sell side. This compared with a consensus among cfr sellers at €18-19/t above May futures earlier this week.
Thursday's drop in basis accelerated a slide in underlying futures. The May and September contracts closed at parity that day, widening the discount to December futures, as traders anticipated high carryover stocks and a slow start to France's 2025-26 export season.
Offers of 11-11.5pc wheat from Baltic ports remained the closest competitors for French sellers in Morocco. But higher freight rates from Baltic ports — latest levels were around €8-9/t above rates from Rouen — put sellers there at a distinct disadvantage, despite relatively low offers for Kazakh-origin wheat available for loading at Baltic ports in recent days.
Moroccan stocks replenished
Any trades for April shipment will add to a long line of vessels that loaded in March and are either on their way to Moroccan ports or have arrived and are waiting to offload.
Poor weather and ocean swells over the past few months have caused considerable delays to port operations. As of 27 March, as many as nine vessels carrying wheat that had set sail in February or March were still waiting to offload in Morocco, data from port authorities show. Ships carrying other commodities are also delayed, with market participants expecting that it could take up to a fortnight to clear the current backlog. Around another 15 ships, mostly loaded from French or Baltic ports in late-March, had yet to arrive, Argus-aggregated data show.
This means that Moroccan millers could receive 800,000t of milling wheat in the next two weeks, enough for nearly two months of consumption.
French wheat prices remain under pressure
The potential of further demand from Moroccan importers in the coming days is likely to keep French prices low. Moroccan traders had mostly withdrawn from the market before Thursday, on expectations of a sharp fall in the rebate that the government will award to cargoes booked for April loading. The April rebate is currently estimated at around 8 dirhams/100kg, compared with the Dh14-15/100kg announced for the previous three months. This means that buying ideas for April cargoes are well below levels paid for March.
And French exporters are keen to clear silos to make space for the upcoming June-July harvest and reduce the volume carried over into the new marketing year.
In France, the local market was liquid for delivery to both Rouen and La Pallice over the past two days, with wheat changing hands at parity or just below the May futures contract on a cpt basis.
French port silos remain fairly full with old-crop wheat, particularly at ports on the western Atlantic coast, given that sellers executed the vast bulk of the volume traded to Morocco for March loading from the northern port of Rouen.
