Saudi Arabia : One millionth tonne of barley headed for Middle East

Major Australian agribusiness, ABB announced on December 16 that it celebrated a significant milestone in its shipping program this week when the millionth tonne of barley was loaded onto a vessel at Port Giles on Yorke Peninsula.

The feed barley, part of a 54,000 tonne consignment which set sail for Saudi Arabia yesterday aboard the Amalia del Bene, brings to 1 million tonnes the total amount of grain shipped by Grain Australia this calendar year.

[Grain Australia is a strategic export alliance between ABB and Grain Pool of Western Australia to increase the reputation of SA, WA and Victorian barley in global markets].

Loading of the Amalia del Bene was completed at Port Giles on Wednesday, after it had previously taken on feed barley at Port Adelaide.

ABB’s general manager marketing, Nigel Officer, said this consignment was the third of this shipping season, but the first this season of the company’s major shipments for the Saudis.

“Grain Australia will ship over 1 million tonnes this harvest from now until April next year,” Mr Officer said.

“This is part of a very heavy front-ended shipping program and with a strong sales program we’ve been able to move a lot of grain straight to ship, minimising costs to growers and reducing overall holding costs.

“One of the current benefits we have with the single desk for exporting barley in South Australia is we are able to regularly contract large volumes of barley, rather than in an ad hoc basis, which might otherwise be the case if we didn’t have the single desk.”

Another seven vessels are scheduled to load barley in South Australian ports for the remainder of this month – five of them feed for Middle East destinations and two containing malting barley for China.

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