Chicago | Reuters—U.S. corn, soybean and wheat futures closed higher on Wednesday, bouncing from multi-month lows set a day earlier as indications that U.S. tariffs against Canada and Mexico may be reduced helped ease market jitters over escalating trade tensions.
Chicago Board of Trade May corn CK25 settled up 4-1/4 cents at $4.55-3/4 a bushel, a day after falling to $4.42-1/2, the contract’s lowest since December. May soybeans SK25 settled up 12-3/4 cents at $10.11-3/4 a bushel and CBOT May wheat WK25 rose 11-1/2 cents to finish at $5.48-1/4 a bushel.
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The markets stabilized after selling off over most of the last week on fears that tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump would curb demand for U.S. commodities.
Trump slapped 25 per cent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada on Tuesday and doubled duties on Chinese goods to 20 per cent, drawing immediate retaliatory steps from Canada and China and a pledge from Mexico to also respond.
The prospect of a fully-fledged trade war roiled financial markets and worried grain investors about a threat to the $191 billion U.S. agricultural export sector.
“It’s a short-term recovery here,” Jack Scoville, vice president at the Price Futures Group, said of Wednesday’s bounce in CBOT grain futures.
“There was some indication that the (Trump) administration was befuddled by the reaction in the marketplace to the tariffs, and might be inclined to pull back on them a little bit,” Scoville said.
On Wednesday, the White House said Trump will exempt automakers from his tariffs on Canada and Mexico for one month as long as they comply with the terms of an existing free trade agreement, and said he is open to hearing about other products that should be exempted.
Some traders and analysts said near-term U.S. grain exports to China may not be significantly altered, given a lull in Chinese corn and wheat imports and a shift towards buying Brazil’s incoming soybean crop.
“Seasonally, this is a time when China relies more heavily on Brazilian supply,” ING said in a note.
Brazil is in the midst of harvesting an expected record soybean crop, a prospect that had already weighed on U.S. prices prior to Trump’s tariff moves this year.
—Additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Naveen Thukral in Singapore
