Cargill on the Prowl

(MoneyWatch)  Cargill, the country's largest privately held company, is looking for acquisitions, at least in Asia, according to Paul Conway, the company's Asia-Pacific president.

"There will be opportunities to acquire both assets, companies and hire people that we didn't think we'd be able to do six months ago," Conway told Bloomberg Television in Singapore (video link).

What's changed in six months? Huge declines in both grain prices and the stocks of potential acquisition targets.

"We missed some opportunities a year ago in Malaysia," Conway said. "We're interested in starch, interested in vegetable oils, fats, all our core businesses."

Look for the company to act quickly. Conway said Cargill believes that commodity prices may be nearing their bottom. But they're not there yet. "Certainly, at the moment, we're starting to see tentative signs of things bottoming out," he said. Prices might start to rebound in "the last third of 2009 or early 2010."