Almond acreage, page-24

Over the past couple of days, a number of the Spanish agri-news sites have been reporting a significant spike in the local almond price.

I'm not entirely sure how significant this, as for some reason the Spanish almond price movements don't seem to correlate well with the Californian price. So it may prove to be of no great significance.

The Spanish crop was hit by terrible frost damage at the end of last month, and the website that are reporting on the price-spike all allude to this event. Still, Spain only produces about 5% of the global almond crop in a typical year, and so I wouldn't have expected the frost damage to have influenced the almond price to such an extent.

Perhaps the Eurozone has some kind of tariff on non-European almonds, and thus the European almond price is more leveraged to the impact of adverse weather conditions in Spain.

However, I noticed that one of those Spanish language news sites seemed to suggest that the tariff situation might also have something to do with this price spike. If so, that would seem to make sense.

Since last year, the Chinese have imposed massive tariffs on US nut imports, almonds included. California typically producers 80% of the almond supply, so following on from the tariff increase, China has become largely dependent on nuts from the other almond producers, the two most notable being Australia (which produces about 7% of the world almond supply in a typical year) and Spain (about 5%).

A large chunk of the nuts produced by Europe and Australia are gobbled up by the locals. That doesn't leave much left for the Chinese.

Given this situation, you can see why the problems in Spain could potentially lead to a jump in the ex-Californian almond price. The Chinese buyers would have already been struggling to sate the local almond demand, and so the prospect of a shortfall from the second largest producer outside of the US could easily lead to panic buying by the Chinese.

Keep in mind I am speculating here, and it won't be clear what is going on until we get more information.

But if it does turns out that the price of Australian almonds has indeed followed in the trajectory of its Spanish counterpart, that should be positive news for this company.

Assuming, of course, they haven't already committed all of their crop. Last year, on the 17th of April, they had committed only 45% of the crop, so I'd say probably not.