Food Inflation The Biden Administration has taken issue with the farm-to-retail spread, arguing it is proof that food companies are too concentrated and are “exploiting” the two ends of the value chain. As noted previously, the farm-to-retail spread has been growing for decades and is largely related to the increasing amount of value added along the value chain. The Administration best get used to the dynamic as Tosin Jack at Mintec notes that the increasing costs for everything from energy to packaging, to transportation, labor and even shipping containers means that inflation and the large farm-to-retail spread is not going away anytime soon. Starving Europeans As President Joe Biden sends the U.S. military to p...
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 hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...