A Lot of Poor Mouths to Feed in Next Decade There will be more mouths to feed in the future but many will reside in the poorest countries and where governance is unstable. This will temper food demand and thus the bull market that has been experienced over the past half dozen years. Climate Change, Global Warming and Agriculture -- What If? There may be a scientific consensus about the global warming impacts of CO 2, but less agreement on how much. Water is a key implication for agriculture and another area of disagreement as to scale of impacts. Famine to Feast The past five years have witnessed unusually high volatility in commodity prices and it has taken longer than expected to recover from supply/demand imbalances considering agri...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes, with the U.S. hitting Iranian bridges, energy sites, and military infrastructure. Iran launched a missile into Kuwait that damaged a desalination plant. Crude oil futures surged on heightened Middle East tensions, providing supp...
Key Takeaways: The EU heatwaves have coincided with key maize crop reproductive timing and featured high nighttime temperatures, a cruel two-sided blow to maize yields. France, much of western Europe, and Hungary have suffered the worst of the heat, with yield potential collapsing. WPI&r...
Congress returned this week from its Fourth of July recess, with another break scheduled for the month of August, to face a busy agenda before adjourning for the August recess. Congress has several priorities, including the National Defense Authorization Act, a potential third reconciliation pa...