World Perspectives
feed-grains livestock

China's Food Security

Beijing proclaims the goal of food self-sufficiency at a 95-percent level on a grain basis but there is inadequate data upon which to judge this feat. Goro Takahashi at Aichi University calculates that China’s food self-sufficiency is declining at more than 1 percent per year (see graph below). The Japanese would know since they have struggled with their own food self-sufficiency that has declined from 80 percent in 1960 to 37 percent today.  While China claims agricultural production on a high percentage (54.7) of its land area, the amount of arable land available per person is less than half that of Japan. Key issues are soil quality and water availability. In recent years, China’s food exports have declined by 34 percen...

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European Market Analysis

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CFTC COT Report Analysis

Once again, the major finding of Friday’s CFTC report is that funds still remain solidly bullish corn and added another 7 percent to their long position in that market. That was particularly impressive as the week ending 19 November (the reporting deadline for the CFTC report) included days wit...

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Market Commentary: Black Sea Instability and Trade War Influences

There were some jitters this week as Russia and Ukraine stepped up assaults ahead of what may become talks to end the conflict. Alongside concerns about a kinetic war is the uncertainty around the incoming Trump Administration’s aggressions in trade policy.It should be noted that geopolitical u...

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CFTC COT Report Analysis

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livestock

Cattle on Feed Report

USDA released the monthly Cattle on Feed report today. Once again, placements surprised to the upside compared to pre-report analysts’ consensus expectations. The total cattle on feed inventory was 11.986 million head, which was slightly above last year’s 11.956 million head. Total feedlot inve...

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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.

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