Brazil Sugar Ships Scheduled to Sail to India, Nigeria, Algeria

(Businessweek) – About 31 percent of all the sugar waiting to be loaded onto ships in Brazil, the world’s largest producer, is headed to India, Nigeria and Algeria, according to shipping agency Williams Servicos Maritimos Ltda.

Vessels scheduled to go to Nigeria will take 142,900 metric tons of sugar and another 103,728 tons are headed to Algeria, data from the Recife, Brazil-based agency known as Williams Brasil, e-mailed yesterday showed. Ships carrying 152,303 tons were scheduled to sail from Brazil’s main ports to India, the world’s second-biggest producer and largest consumer.

Nigeria will import 1.45 million tons of sugar in 2012-13, unchanged from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Shipments into Algeria will total 2.15 million tons, up from 1.8 million tons in 2011-12, the data showed. Both countries have sugar refiners. India is among the countries that are importing more sweetener than initially forecast, according to Lausanne, Switzerland-based researcher Kingsman SA.

Global sugar shipments to the south Asian nation will total 400,000 tons in the fourth quarter, Jonathan Kingsman, founder of the researcher, said on Oct. 25. That’s 80 percent of the imports forecast by the Foreign Agricultural Service unit of the USDA for the whole of the 2012-13 season that started this month. India’s sugar output will drop to 24 million tons in 2012-13 because of dry weather, according to the Indian Sugar Mills Association. That compares with an estimate of 26.2 million tons in the past season.

The amount of sugar waiting to be loaded at Brazil’s main ports dropped 11 percent in the past week, Williams Brasil data showed. About 1.27 million tons of the sweetener awaited loading at the ports of Recife, Maceio, Suape, Vitoria, Paranagua and Santos, the country’s biggest, according to the data. That compares with 1.4 million tons a week earlier.

Raw sugar for March delivery slid 0.5 percent to 19.14 cents a pound by 5:28 a.m. on ICE Futures U.S. in New York.

To contact the reporter on this story: Isis Almeida in London at  ialmeida3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Deane at  jdeane3@bloomberg.net