Some days the story is in the ranking. Monday's screen sorted itself into an odd order: a soft commodity on top, the barrel splitting in two directions, and the metal everyone is watching quietly giving a little back three days before a Zambian election.
1. Sugar, +8.4%
Raw sugar number 11 went from 15.15 to 16.42 US cents a pound, roughly 362 dollars a tonne, the largest single move on the board and the only double-digit-adjacent one. The pressure is coming out of India, where mills are running a deficit year against ethanol commitments: cane that goes to the distillery does not go to the sack, and the blending programme has political defenders who are not in a mood to give the molasses back. A country that used to be the swing exporter is now the swing consumer, and the futures curve is being asked to price that.
2. Brent, +6.3%, and the barrel that split
Brent settled at 84.45 dollars a barrel, up from 79.45. Underneath it the products did not move together. Diesel rose 5.7% to 4.0126 dollars a gallon, about 1,256 dollars a tonne, while gasoline fell 2.1% to 2.7782, about 992 dollars a tonne. That is a distillate story rather than a crude story: Iranian loadings out of Kharg have effectively stopped under the renewed naval blockade, and airlines are bidding against each other for jet fuel with the Hormuz disruption into its second month. Middle distillate is where the shortage lives. Anyone buying gasoil for West or East African discharge is now paying for someone else's flight schedule.
3. Gasoline, -2.1%, and copper, -1.3%
Copper on COMEX slipped to 6.619 dollars a pound, 14,592 dollars a tonne, after 6.703 on Friday. Lusaka is unbothered: official data has copper closing last week at 14,103.50 dollars a tonne, up 2.18% on the week and 14% since the start of 2026, when it was 12,423. The domestic argument has turned from price to ownership, with analysts pushing a minimum Zambian equity threshold on new mining investment ahead of Thursday's general election on 13 August. Ballot papers reached Lusaka in 40 pallets over the weekend and have now been distributed as far as Feira. Two or three days of border and haulage friction around a poll is the normal cost of doing business on the Copperbelt.
4. Wheat, +0.9%
Chicago wheat closed at 648 cents a bushel, 238 dollars a tonne, up from 642.25. The number is small and the context is not: Algeria's OAIC bought 540,000 to 720,000 tonnes in its latest tender, Jordan is out for 120,000 tonnes of feed barley, and Turkey is holding up some transits to Black Sea ports after strikes on Turkish-linked vessels, alongside a public call for a strike moratorium. Ukrainian estimates put the potential fall in grain exports at 53% if the port attacks continue. The market is treating all of that as worth six cents.
5. The five that did not move at all
Urea held at 400 dollars a tonne, DAP at 792.50, sulphur at 9,535.67 yuan (about 1,417 dollars a tonne), cobalt at 56,290 and the Baltic Dry at 3,089. Flat lines in the middle of an oil move are a reminder that fertilizer prices are set by contracts and plant schedules rather than by screens. Two fires kept sulphur people busy anyway: Aramco's Jazan refinery blaze was put out with no injuries reported, and a toxic sulphur fire forced evacuations at Port Adelaide.
Off the screen
Lualaba is building grain silos. A mission from the Réserve stratégique générale, the presidency's strategic reserve service, has been at Tenke, about 100 kilometres from Kolwezi, preparing a 32,500-tonne storage facility, one of four provinces in the first phase of the national food reserve programme. In Conakry, Guinea has banned raw gold exports and is demanding domestic refining, joining the processing-first club. And Kinshasa has already disbursed 137.894 million dollars of its Eurobond proceeds on the Grand Katende dam and the N'djili and Luano airports.