The US Bloomberg website unveiled that wheat prices rose worldwide after Egypt decided to buy 55,000 tons of wheat from the US and to ban the import of Ukrainian wheat until next June due to the poor quality of this product. An official at the US Department of Commerce said US wheat prices had risen by 8.3% (4.7% in November) due to the lower quantities available on the market, the ban of Ukrainian wheat and the expected rise in demand. The US Department of Agriculture said yesterday that the US had already loaded 27% additional wheat in the previous week, while exports of Ukrainian wheat had dropped to 1.1 million tons in November (down from 2.2 million tons in October and 2.5 million in September) due to the global financial crisis. An expert at the US Wheat Associates in Cairo, Hassan Abdel Ghaffar, said Egypt is not oriented to import wheat from the US. He added that the markets exporting such product worldwide are the US, Australia, Canada, the EU, and the Black Sea countries. He added that the temporary stop to wheat imports from Ukraine aimed at drawing the Kiev's attention to the necessity of improving the level of its wheat. Abel Ghaffar pointed out that the wheat recently imported by Egypt had been infected by a specific and common kind of insects, saying that this is typical at the time of the crop and that repercussions were felt in the quality of the bread produced in Egyptian bakeries. Abdel Ghaffar, though, denied the news that the wheat imported was not fit for human consumption or that it was ill. He affirmed no country is better than another in terms of wheat quality, as the key element is how much wheat suits the final product for which it is used. For instance, he said pasta and biscuits can not be produced with the wheat used to make bread. Dr. Mohamed el-Nahrawi, professor of crops at the Agricultural Research Center (ARC) - affiliated to the Ministry of Trade - said the General Authority for Supply Commodities (Ministry of Trade) aims at importing the best quality of wheat at the lowest price. He said the wheat lately imported from Ukraine was of poor quality. As a result, Egypt resorted one more time to the US, from which it used to import 80% of this commodity.
