Russia may export 12m tons of grain in 2002-2003 season

Russia exported a record amount of grain totaling 2.094m tons in November 2002. So one can forecast that Russia will export some 12m tons of grain in the 2002-2003 season, Arkady Zlochevsky, the head of the Russian grain union, said in an interview with RosBusinessConsulting. He stressed that in 2002 Russia had exported 9.5m tons of grain.

In November Russia exported 1.79m tons of wheat, which is a new record for Russia, 287,000 tons of barley and 17,000 tons of rye.

According to different estimations, in the 2001-2002 season Russia exported (for the first time over the previous 70 years) from 5.5m to 7m tons of grain. The maximum volume of Russian grain exports was registered in the year 1913, when the country produced 80m tons and exported 10.5m tons of grain.