Price and export market share should be correlated. In other words, lower cost producers should be able to expand their sales while higher cost sellers should see a decline in exports. With wheat, that may not be true. However, just looking at the farmgate value of wheat in the top exporting nations reveals a small negative correlation (-0.2) between cost of production and the change in export market share over the past five years. Russia is a relatively low-cost producer and has expanded its exports, but so has Canada, a relatively higher priced supplier. Turkey has grown export market share versus the decline in U.S. wheat exports despite being a higher cost producer. But then many believe Turkey is subsidizing exports, particularly with...
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.
Energy: Risk Over Rules Fighting between the United States and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz escalated overnight. Tehran accused U.S. forces of striking a residential area after U.S. Central Command said its second round of attacks in three days targeted Iranian radar systems and mi...
Key Takeaways: Ghana’s new law classifies all cocoa plantations as “protected farms,” which carries significant implications for farmers. Chief among these implications is the inability to switch area under cocoa to other crops, even when economic or biological conditio...
Key Takeaways: Paraguay typically ranks among the world’s largest soybean exporters, with roughly two-thirds of its production destined for export markets, although most shipments remain within South America. As a landlocked country, Paraguay relies heavily on the Paraguay-Paraná...