Food Security Angst Norway announced that it would spend $6 million a year for five years to build up a 60–75-thousand-ton grain reserve, or a three-month supply. The head of the Olam agricultural trading warned of a potential future food war. Supply chains are fragile, countries are erecting barriers and using near-shoring, and climate change threatens production. Yet investment funds have built historically large net short positions in agricultural commodities. And the advice from international agricultural policy organizations is to continue using trade for food supply resiliency – not price depressing food stockpiles. More Trade Agreements A group of 48 trade associations, including several representing agriculture,...
There was heavy volume exiting soybeans, which dragged down the broader market today. The lack of a specific Chinese buying commitment for soybeans undermined speculators who had placed bets on state-directed trade. But even the Chinese do not totally ignore market fundamentals. They may still...
On Tuesday, 12 May, WPI reported on an Executive Order being prepared by the Trump Administration to suspend tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on beef from all exporters for 200 days as a means of addressing high beef prices in the United States. After considerable pushback from cattle producer groups,...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscribe online after this date to...
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.