Louis Dreyfus Commodities has said that its 53-year-old Swiss billionaire chair is pregnant with twin girls. Margarita Louis-Dreyfus is due in early April and will only take a “brief break” from work, before returning later that month.

France’s long-standing farm co-operatives will need to scale up further and build effective infrastructure to avoid being marginalised as niche players while global commodity giants broaden their footprint on international grain markets.