Apr 08, 2010
Rains Have Slowed The Exports Of Soybeans From Brazil
Author: Michael Cordonnier/Soybean & Corn Advisor, Inc.
Brazilian soybean farmers have produced a record soybean crop, but delays at the Brazilian ports have kept the pace of the soybean exports slower than desired. The main grain port in Brazil is the Port of Paranagua located in the state of Parana. They can't load vessels at the port when it's raining and unfortunately, the month of March was quite wet along the coast of Parana. The result has been a huge lineup of vessels waiting to load grain at the port.
During much of March, there were approximately 20 vessels waiting to load at any one time and the average wait time to load was about three weeks. Both the number of vessels waiting to load and the waiting time are about double what is normal for this time of the year.
The public part of the port can load three ships at a time and each ship takes approximately two days to load depending on the equipment and the weather. The majority of the grain arriving at the port comes by truck and it takes about 2,000 trucks to load a 60,000-ton vessel. During the peak of the export season, approximately 5,000 to 6,000 trucks per day arrive at the port carrying soybeans. As of last week, there were 438,000 tons of soybeans at the port, or enough to load 7 vessels.
In past years, the Port of Paranagua was famous for its extremely long lines of trucks waiting to unload. At its worst point in the early 2000's, trucks were lined up for over 75 kilometers while they waited to get into the port. Those long lines ended in 2004 when the port initiated a new system of allowing trucks to enter the port. Today, trucks must be registered at the port and port officials will only allow a truck into the facility once it has been called to the port and they won't call in a truck until there is a vessel waiting for its cargo. The truckers must now wait at staging points in the interior of the state until they are called to the port.
This new system has solved the problem of long lines of trucks, but it hasn't made the exports move out of the port any faster.
As the rainy season starts to wind down, the loading pace should pick up at the port, but these delays on the front end of the export season are going to result in an extended export season on the back end in October, November, and December. With such a huge crop to export, there is a strong possibility that South American soybean exports will compete with new crop exports out of the U.S. in the fall.