Jun 16, 2010
Truckers Forced to Wait Two Days to Unload Soybeans in Parana
Author: Michael Cordonnier/Soybean & Corn Advisor, Inc.
The combination of a record large crop and inadequate infrastructure continues to cause problems in Brazil. Take for example the Imcopa Grain Company in the city of Cambe located in northern Parana. Last week, the line of trucks waiting at their facility to unload soybeans from Mato Grosso stretched more than ten kilometers along the highway and the truckers were forced to wait for two days or longer before they could unload their cargo.
Company officials attribute the problem to the fact that they were actually trying to ship out more soybeans than what was coming into the facility in order to free up some storage space for the safrinha corn which is about to be harvested. The company said they only wanted to unload 180 trucks per day, but that 250 trucks were arriving at their facility on a daily basis. Company officials said they expected to have the situation normalized within a week or so.
This is little consolidation for truckers who traveled two and a half days from Nova Mutum in central Mato Grosso only to be forced to wait for two more days before being allowed to unload their soybeans. For each day they are forced to wait, they lose approximately R$ 300 in potential commissions.
Acerbating the storage problem in Brazil is the lack of on-farm storage which forces farmers to store their production at the local co-op or at a commercial grain facility. The farmers this year have been very slow sellers of their grain which ties up even more storage space than normal. Low commodity prices are the reason for the slow selling of course and many Brazilian farmers are waiting for improved prices as a result of adverse weather in the U.S. before they sell the remainder of their production.
Mato Grosso and Parana had the largest soybean production in their history at 18.8 and 13.8 million tons respectively.