Market Morsel: Canola exports strong but seasonal lull

Market Morsel

At the end of last week, I wrote about wheat exports from Australia. In this update, let’s have a look at our canola exports.

The first chart below shows the seasonal exports of canola from Australia. It is heavily front-loaded, with very little sent overseas from June to October.

Australia doesn’t have a hugely diverse canola market. In the past financial year, we sent canola seed to 28 countries, but the top ten make up 98% of our exports.

This can be seen in the second chart, which represents the market for Australian canola according to Comtrade data. Japan is our biggest single country; however, we generally tend to think of the EU as one country. In the past financial year, Europe has been the buyer of 39% of all exports.

The third chart below shows the percentage of our canola trade that heads to Europe. Europe tends to slow down its exports in their summer as local harvests become available.