ABSTRACT
Agricultural policies, especially in the USA and the EC, have a large and important impact on grains markets. By the end of 1987, however, there were signs that production restraint in major exporters, a realignment of the dollar and improving consumption in developing countries were pulling the wheat market out of its prolonged period of weak prices. Certainly, long-term forecasts for wheat consumption, based on likely population growth in developing countries, suggest that the focus of policy-makers will be turning back to ways of expanding production by the mid-1990s. First, world trade as a percentage of production is smaller than in the wheat market; this simply reflects the fact that most feedgrains are consumed in the country of production. Trading the grains markets is a matter of forming a view on one or other of the factors which influence the supply-demand balance.
