What Do the StatsCan Stocks Numbers Say?
This week, StatsCan released its estimates of crop stocks as of July 31. This was based on a farmer survey a couple of months earlier, so it is somewhat stale-dated. Despite its limitations, these numbers can be helpful in looking ahead to the new marketing year of 2025/26. The July 31 stocks are the carryover into the following year and, together with the incoming crop, determine the supply situation for 2025/26.
StatsCan reported July 31 stocks of peas at 489,000 tonnes, up nearly 200,000 tonnes from 2023/24 and about 100,000 tonnes above the 5-year average. Inventories would have been lower if China hadn’t imposed tariffs and is a mildly negative number (on its own). Together with StatsCan’s initial yield production estimate of 3.41 mln tonnes, total 2025/26 supplies would end up just shy of four million tonnes, nearly 600,000 tonnes more than last year.
From a longer term perspective, these supplies aren’t considered huge but must be viewed in light of the challenging export picture. There is considerable uncertainty in the export outlook with respect to both China and India and those outcomes could overshadow the Canadian supply situation. It’s also quite likely that later production estimates will be larger than these initial reports.
For lentils, StatsCan reported large 2024/25 ending stocks of 624,000 tonnes, up sharply from the previous year and the most since 2018/19. Based on production and exports in 2024/25, we expect most of those would be red lentils. At the same time, StatsCan’s initial estimate of the 2025 crop is also larger than last year and the combination of these two amounts would mean 3.4 mln tonnes of lentil supplies in 2025/26. That’s up 600,000 tonnes (22%) from last year and would be the largest on record.
These heavy supplies of Canadian lentils make the export prospects much more critical for the 2025/26 price outlook. It looks like exports could improve in the coming year, but they’ll need to pick up a lot to deal with the big supplies, which could get even bigger based on harvest results.
Chickpea exports were very positive in 2024/25 but StatsCan still reported an increase in July 31 stocks at 92,000 tonnes, up more than 50% from the previous year. StatsCan is also forecasting a sizable increase in the 2025 crop, which would push total supplies up to 440,000 tonnes, the most since 2020/21. That said, Canadian exports have been strong, helped by lower prices, and if that continues, these supplies won’t feel much heavier.
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