Saturday, 3 October 2026. Prints as of the Friday close.
CREDIT: whoever is long the FAO basket
World food prices have reached their highest level since November 2022 on the UN's index. The loudest single line on the screen was raw sugar: #11 went to 19.91 US cents per pound from 17.46, a 14.0% session, which is 439 USD per tonne. Wheat moved the other way, 683 cents a bushel from 688.75, or 251 USD/t. Supporting detail from the cane belt: in drought-hit Latur, Maharashtra, farmers are cutting standing sugarcane to feed livestock because fodder has run short.
DEBIT: the distillate bulls
ULSD lost 5.3% in one session to 4.501 USD per gallon, 1,409 USD/t, with Brent down 2.9% to 102.25 USD a barrel. Iran and the US remain far apart on terms, and crude flows have climbed back near pre-war levels. Ottawa is pricing the other tail: Canada's energy minister says the country has backup plans if Washington bans diesel exports, which would leave eastern Canadian refiners and their US Gulf customers rerouting barrels into an Atlantic market already carrying war-risk freight.
CREDIT: Gulf granular sellers
Urea gained 3.2% to 446.5 USD/t while the supply argument behind the rally softened: roughly 170,000 tonnes of sulphur crossed the Strait of Hormuz alongside urea cargoes, easing the tightness that built through the conflict. Chinese sulphur sat unchanged at 7,702.33 CNY/t, 1,149 USD/t, and DAP held at 802.5 USD/t for a second print. Potash has no published print today, the free sources being down.
DEBIT: the copper deficit story
KGHM and South32 have started work on a 725 million dollar fourth grinding line at Sierra Gorda, lifting processing capacity 26%, with construction scheduled from 2027. Freeport's Grasberg mill is back to 67% after the mudslide and the company expects near-full output by the end of next year. COMEX copper eased 0.3% to 6.549 USD per pound, 14,438 USD/t, holding its ground on a softer dollar after weak US jobs data.
CREDIT: Lusaka's deal book
The Zambia Development Agency is targeting more than 5 billion dollars of investment and deals at the second Invest-Zambia conference in December. In the same week President Hichilema pressed the visiting UK trade commissioner for British money, and the commissioner pledged to go find investors for the Grow Zambia agenda.
DEBIT: the Kinshasa-Kigali payments channel
A request out of Kinshasa asks the US Treasury's OFAC to examine Bank of Kigali's agreement with China's CIPS, the yuan clearing system, on the argument that it opens a settlement route around dollar oversight. The UN Security Council separately repeated its call for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of Rwandan forces from eastern DRC and an end to support for AFC/M23. In Fizi, the rains have arrived on top of some 240,000 internally displaced people.
CREDIT: the toolmakers
Cloudflare's observability stack now carries logs, detailed tracing, a SQL API, custom alerting, CDN logs via Logpush for all plans and built-in error monitoring, and the cloudflare-os repository passed 10,000 GitHub stars. Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 landed in Antigravity for paid users, and Nat Friedman published Muse Gadgets, an open-source ESP32 firmware plus Linux SDK for building hardware against Muse.
Carried forward
- Baltic Dry unchanged at 3,148, after a second straight capesize-led gain on Friday.
- Cobalt unchanged at 39,140 USD/t; palm oil unchanged at 4,535 MYR/t, 1,110 USD/t.
- ExpoBeton Kinshasa runs 7 to 10 October, themed on city planning for the capital.
- China's decree 837 tightens Beijing's control over outbound investment, a live question for Chinese capital in Congolese and Zambian mining.
- Two recovered Ebola patients were discharged from the Mutwanga treatment centre near Beni.