Author Description

This work offers detailed reference information on the world grain trade. The main difficulty about any attempt to describe the world grain trade is its extraordinary complexity. Every country trades grain - there may be only five major exporters of wheat and coarse grains but there are a myriad of importers: there are countries which export rice in significant quantities and which also import it. A further complication is that grains are of different varieties and qualities, are processed, and enter into agricultural trade in the guise of flour, bran, offals, starch, malt and so on, while also being used for many non-agricultural industrial purposes, ranging from adhesives, paper, board, motor fuel and so on, - all of which have their own trading patterns. In the Brussels tariff headings no fewer than 122 are allotted to wheat and coarse grains and 34 to rice - moreover, these are just the main headings and do not include the products and by-products, or such items as compound feedingstuffs and substitutes, wih which a trader has to be familiar.