Wheat Prices CBOT jump 34 percent

Wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade, the global benchmark, have jumped 34 percent this year, the best performance among 24 commodities on the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index. The December contract gained 1.2 percent to $8.7875 a bushel at 9:24 a.m. local time. In Paris, milling wheat for January delivery rose 1.2 percent to 261.50 euros ($340.71) a ton, after earlier touching 262.25 euros, the highest in a week.

Traders should be “cautious” when signing wheat export contracts, Bisyuk said in an e-mailed statement after today’s meeting, stopping short of saying the government plans to implement official restrictions. Ukraine had exported 7.1 million tons of grain this season, as of Oct. 16, he said.

“Ukraine just doesn’t have enough grain to continue the pace for the rest of the season,” Matt Ammermann, a risk management consultant with INTL FCStone Inc. in London, said by phone today. “It seems like the market has been talking about this for a while. The government has been addressing the situation over the past few months, so I don’t think it catches the market too much by surprise.”

Global inventories of wheat, soybeans and corn may drop to 347.8 million tons by the end of the 2012-13 season, according to the USDA, a five-year low, as dry weather cut crop yields from the U.S. to Europe to Australia.