Denmark’s Cimbria is building a wheat silo complex in Port Said for the General Company for Silos and Storage (GCSS), the company announced in a statement in March. The facility will have capacity to hold 100k tons of wheat — enough to cover more than 15% of Egypt’s current estimated storage shortfall. Construction began in February and is expected to be complete within two years. The complex will be co-funded by the OPEC Fund and the government.

Why is this needed? Our current storage capacity — with a total of 44 silos and other storage units, totaling a capacity of 5.4 mn tonnes — still leaves a gap of around 600k tonnes of the 6 mn tonnes the government plans to procure domestically this season. The system we currently have in place for storing grain involves toning down wheat imports around the harvest season to make space for increasing domestic supply. The government then restarts the import cycle once it dips into the local wheat reserves. Having a complex for imported wheat could allow us to import wheat year-round.

Cimbria is big in Egypt: The company says it has provided Egypt with 95% of its silo complexes. It received its biggest order in its history from Egypt last year when it was contracted to deliver 23 silos with a total capacity of almost 1.4 mn tons.

OTHER COMMODITIES NEWS- Egypt has turned away two Russian vessels allegedly carrying stolen Ukrainian wheat, Ruslan Nechai, Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Egypt, told the Wall Street Journal. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has accused Russia of hijacking cargoes of Ukrainian grain and shipping it to the Middle East.