U.S. share of world wheat exports continues to decline

The United States is one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat—second only to the European Union and ahead of the world’s other major exporters including Canada, Australia and Russia—but its share of global wheat exports has trended lower over several decades and is expected to continue to decline over the next 10 years. While US wheat exports are expected to trend modestly higher from 2015 through 2024, exports from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan could account for nearly half of the projected increase in world wheat trade, notwithstanding the weather-related production fluctuations that are common in this region. Growth in wheat imports is concentrated in developing countries where income and population gains drive increases in demand, including regions of West Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and other parts of North Africa and the Middle East, Indonesia and Pakistan. In many of these markets, Black Sea and EU exporters maintain a cost advantage over the United States reflecting transportation distance, as well as the fact that U.S. wheat exports are almost exclusively for high-value food markets while much of the wheat imported by developing countries is for lower value uses including livestock feed. Nevertheless, the United States will remain one of the world’s leading suppliers of high-quality wheat, with exports projected to rise slowly during the coming decade, even as its share of global exports falls from 17.8 percent in 2015/16 to 16.1 percent in 2024/25. This chart is based on the report, USDA Agricultural Projections to 2024.

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