ABSTRACT
Investigate international wheat marketing in the post-war period and you immediately enter the world of political economy where the outstanding feature seems to be the use of tactics designed to ‘buy’ customers. The casual observer can be forgiven for thinking that wheat sales have nothing to do with marketing skills and everything to do with the willingness of governments to provide both sufficient funds to ensure that prices are competitive and the means (credit) by which customers can pay for grain. There is, nevertheless, as this chapter seeks to show, another, more subtle, side to wheat marketing. Its importance derives from the fact that, notwithstanding the critical role of price and credit considerations, a great many wheat buyers are quality-conscious. They want cheap wheat, certainly, but they also want wheat which will meet their quality requirements. The quality characteristic upon which most attention has focused whether the purchasers be bakers, noodle makers or biscuit manufacturers – is the protein content of wheat, for this has a greater influence on processing quality than any other single factor. That buyers have become more discriminating can be seen most readily in increasingly tighter specifications with respect to protein content and in the ever-growing proportion of total sales based on specific protein requirements. Buyers have also been insistent that suppliers be able to deliver wheat with particular quality attributes on a regular basis. The argument here is that in this world of increasingly quality-conscious wheat buyers, true marketing skills, and not just the budgetary largesse of an exporting country’s government, have been and remain important in determining a wheat exporter’s ability to enter new markets and to maintain and increase market share in existing ones.
