Canola fell for the third straight day on Wednesday as new Chinese trade levies announced over the weekend continued to overhang the market.
China’s 100% tariffs on imports of Canadian canola oil and meal, scheduled to take effect March 20, have battered canola all week. The trade news got worse today, as Canada and the EU today announced retaliatory tariffs against the US in response to its own tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Together, the US and China account for over half of all Canadian grain exports, with Canadian farmers facing an increasing fraught world trade environment as they get ready to plant the 2025 crop.
A Statistics Canada acreage report this morning pegged Canadian new-crop canola planting intentions at 21.646 million acres, down 1.7% from a year earlier. That is potentially the lowest since 21.395 acres went into the ground in 2022.
However, the StatsCan number is already open to debate. The estimate is based on a survey of 8,200 Canadian farmers between Dec. 13 and Jan. 27 – long before the canola market was impacted by US and China trade disruptions.
May canola was down $17.60 at $559.30, and November lost $12.90 to $599.10.
