It’s hardly an original observation but what happens here in the UK these days is almost irrelevant to the price of wheat.

This was reinforced by the senior analyst at the HGCA (sorry, the AHDB since the merger of levy-funded bodies), Jack Watts, at that organisation’s annual Outlook conference in London last week.

Sure, he quoted the DEFRA estimate of this year’s UK yields, released on the very morning on which he spoke (14.83m tonnes for wheat, in case you’re interested) but virtually every other statistic, and there was a host of them, related to global production and demand using figures mainly sourced from the USDA.

World wheat production was anticipated to be down 29m tonnes, or 4.3%, he said. Maize yields would be down a more modest 9m tonnes, or 1.1%. And barley a much more serious 15m tonnes down, which equates to a reduction of around 10.5%, much of it related to the heatwave in FSU countries through the summer.

Moreover, some of those deficits would have been worse if it hadn’t been for better than expected crops in the USA, China and parts of Australia.

Meanwhile, world demand continued to rise, largely because of bigger tonnages required by China and other developing countries. Incidentally, given that China has now displaced Japan as the second biggest economy in the world, after America, I wonder how long we should go on calling it “developing”. Then again, having been there relatively recently I would have to concede that half the population, the rural half, still qualifies for that description.

Clearly that combination of a smaller global crop and potential increasing demand has caused prices to rise unexpectedly over the last few months. But as Jack Watts pointed out, “this is not 2007/08 when the stocks to use ratio was much smaller”. Certainly, if you assume a degree of interchangeability between wheat, which is in short supply, and maize, of which there appears to be an adequate stock, there does not seem to be a big enough world grain shortage to justify the recent price hikes.

The joker in that particular pack is who holds the stocks and what they will do with them. According to the USDA, China holds more than 56m tonnes of wheat, or 29% of the entire worlds stock of that grain. Whether that figure is accurate is a matter for some conjecture. China is such a vast country and its infrastructure so complex that it must be difficult to be sure.

India is another large stockholder of wheat with more than 16m tonnes or 8% of the world total. Similar comments might be made as for China. Furthermore, even if the numbers are correct, those tonnages will not be available to the rest of the world because those who hold them will want to release them domestically to keep down the cost of food and try to avoid the kind of food riots that took place in some countries a couple of years ago.

So, what of the “Outlook” for UK growers and trade around which the conference was built. Jack Watts was a little reluctant to commit himself to advice, preferring to say forward sales must be “an individual decision”. But he did suggest that today’s higher world prices would lead to more production next year, which implied lower prices and more volatility.

There was not a single mention from the platform of the seriously rain-affected UK drilling programme this autumn and any implication it may have. Then again, in world terms it’s almost irrelevant.