rain, page-5

Just repeating what I hear from my wheat buyers Alpha. They are reporting that the AWB has the noodle wheat market cornered and have been selling to the Japs at premium prices and using those premiums to subsidise their buy bids in the Australian APW market, which is far more competitive rather than returning it to Australian noodle wheat growers. Noodles are currently not being chased by any of the traders because of the preferential arrangement AWB allegedly has with Japanese traders. We will be lucky to have anybody growing noodle wheat here in the West next year. If AWB had of been allowed to fail by the previous government we would have never seen such a distortion in the noodle market.

As to AWB's ability to collectively bargain you know my opinion varies to yours because I argue we never had any benchmarks to guage exactly how well they were doing on our behalf. That fact is undisputable for my mind.

Hope all is well ... a wave of foreclosures on grain farms likely in WA's south because of a very bad year with frost, winter drought and summer rain damage. Ugly unfortunately ...