Crop Biotechnology News

SINGAPORE, Nov 6 (Reuters) - China has eased quarantine inspections for South American soybeans, triggering hopes that the first U.S. cargoes this season would face no major hurdles, traders said on Tuesday.

A quarantine official in the northern Chinese port of Yantai told Reuters on Monday the first U.S. cargo from the new crop arrived over the weekend and inspection was expected to take up to a month. But traders in China do not expect quarantine authorities to hold back the U.S. soy for more than several days, especially as it was booked before June 6, the cut-off day for China`s new rules on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Neither the buyer nor the supplier of the Yantai cargo had been informed of any problems or told it would be treated differently than earlier South American cargoes.

The 60,000 tonnes of U.S. soybeans were to be discharged from the ship on Tuesday, one day later than scheduled due to low tides, a trader close to the cargo said.

``But the thing is the market is not very good,`` the trader in Shanghai added. ``Maybe the delivery will be very slow because crushers do not have good financial situations. They try to get only what they need.``

Like others, the trader said Chinese domestic prices for soybeans and soymeal remained weak, even though the fourth quarter was usually the peak season for feed demand ahead of the Lunar New Year celebration early the following year.

NO NEWS ON GMO RULES, HOPES HIGH

Traders said Beijing had not yet released implementation details on the new GMO regulations, which have bogged down Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans for the past several months.

It is still next to impossible to acquire new import licences because nobody knows how to obtain a required GMO safety certificate, they said.

In the first positive signal, quarantine authorities seemed to have relaxed inspections since the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Shanghai last month. They had been tightened since September.

Traders said the authorities had given permission to move South American cargoes which had been stopped at port silos for as long as four weeks without much explanation.

``Beans in China have been released and we haven`t heard of any more detention, so inspections seem to have been relaxed,`` said a trader in Hong Kong.

Some traders also smelled a change in the U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) export inspection report on Monday that showed 346,437 tonnes of soybeans were being loaded for China. ``There have been some rumours that some cargoes had been traded (for China). But the volume was not as much as that,`` the Hong Kong trader at an international house said. Others remained sceptical on whether China would need to open the door for soy imports in the very near future given particularly soft domestic soymeal prices.

Crushing capacity has grown too fast and the feed industry now faced low domestic prices for hog and poultry as meat exports were hit by the global economic downturn, traders said.

The USDA attache in Beijing on Monday reduced the Chinese soy import forecast for the year started in October to 12 million tonnes from the previous prediction of 14 million. This compares with 13.25 million tonnes for the previous marketing year.