Macroeconomics Food Costs See Another Big Jump in August Food prices across China rose by 6.1 percent last month, marking the second straight increase of more than 6 percent from prices a year ago. The uptick in July and August are the two strongest surges in the past 22 months. Ongoing pandemic lockdowns, high energy prices, and surging agricultural commodity costs have all contributed to the about-face in the cost food over the summer. August’s figures also marked the fifth consecutive month that the average price for food was up from a year ago. Leading the way was the cost of pork, which saw strong gains last month and rose by 22.4 percent compared to August 2021. It was followed by the prices for fresh fruit, cooking oil, fres...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
Let’s return briefly to the fake meat hype cycle, now sitting somewhere in a dusty corner of your mind, not entirely forgotten. What happened to all those products, known as plant-based alternative proteins? They were supposed to be as good as real meat—cheaper, more environmentally...
From WPI Consulting
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.