¡Compañeros! Here's yer AG report

(all objects to scale)

We're ALL compañeros ...'cause we all eat bread.

And if the Yanq is givin' the ag report, you know it's gonna have it's fair share of weirdness!  And this year, what's weirder'n wheat?

The wheat world has changed big time:

Back in 2005, before the drought and a few world shaking agro decisions by Argentina, yer above blue countries, the US, France & Argentina, were all top 5 wheat exporters ...and all 3 have been for about a 100 years.

Your above major green country, Brazil, has always been a wheat importer.  In fact, almost every loaf of bread ever baked in Brazil has been from Argentine flour (bread wheat needs cold temperatures, Brazil's a little too warm for that.)

Back to France for a second: no nation on earth is more famous for bread than the French.  Strangely though, the French actually IMPORT most of the wheat that they use for the famous baguettes ...French wheat just doesn't generally come up to the high French standards for bread.

The French import bread wheat from Argentina and the US ...or at least they used to.

Enter 2010!  Government measures designed to keep good Argentine bread cheap and plentiful on the supermarket shelves of Buenos Aires (at least until election day) have "wiped Argentina off the map of wheat exporters." 

So... no bread wheat from Argentina for the French ...nor the Brazilians!

The further weirdness: the Brazilians are now importing wheat from, among other places, France ...even though it's not generally well suited for bread.

Ag stories always seem like small potatoes.  Argentine ag stories might seem even smaller ...but when you are talking about Argentina, one of the world's great "bread baskets" and a forward component of the wheat-beef people*, any fluctuations can shake-up your lunch.

*The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn't need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That's not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.