News

When Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev’sOAO National Reserve Bank seized collateral offered against a loan from a cash-strapped borrower, a health quarantine was slapped on the security: 40,450 pigs. “We had a court decision to take away the collateral, which is the pigs,” Lebedev, 49, said in an interview in Moscow. The borrower, a farm near Samara on the Volga river, agreed “with the local authorities to establish a quarantine” against African swine fever. The former KGB officer is still waiting to collect the pigs offered against a loan of 100 million rubles ($3.5 million). A kilogram of live pig costs an average of 78.4 rubles, the National Meat Association says.

In the current year, governmental purchasing interventions on the market of grains will start on November 2, declared Elena Skrynnik, the Minister of Agriculture, on October 23.

“The real negative point of this is that nearly all corn sold was to fill out soymeal cargos,” said MaxYield commodity trade adviser Karl Setzer. “Nobody really wanted our corn, but took it anyway.”

Traders and analysts differ on the significance of the weak sales, whether they have been caused by higher prices and to what extent the poor sales would weigh on the market.

Ukraine harvested 42.85 million metric tons of grain in the year to Oct. 20 on 14.5 million hectares, or 94% of the total area to be harvested, with an average yield of 2.95 tons a hectare, the Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday.