World Perspectives

Food’s Fools Gold

Correlation is not causation, but many nations focus their investments on agriculture due to idealizing food self-sufficiency. That can come at the expense of other investments that could prove more valuable.  Egypt has made a concentrated effort to improve its food self-sufficiency but had to reduce its target for 2025 from 65 percent locally grown wheat to meeting 51 percent of requirements domestically. The country has made progress, largely via expanded land use, irrigation, and improved genetics. But it pays domestic farmers substantially more for their wheat than it would cost to import the grain. At the same time, the country’s consumption subsidies for bread and flour drives wheat demand ever higher. On its face, Egypt has impr...

Related Articles

Sino-Ag Developments

EconomyLeaders gather this month for the annual Central Economic Work Conference with the view of another sub-par year ahead and the need for bold action to turn the economy around. Recent measures have included lowering the cash reserve requirements at banks so that more money is available for...

FOB Prices and Freight Rates App (Updated 18 December)

Ocean Freight Comments - 13 December 2024By Matt HerringtonDry bulk freight markets are in the middle of the holiday-season slowdown with thin and very quiet trade characterizing what little market activity is present. The peak demand period from the North American grain harvest has now past bu...

Dissecting the Retail Sales Report

Retail sales rose 0.7 percent in November; this was slightly higher than the consensus expectations. There are a few nuances to consider, however. First, the Thanksgiving holiday was late this year. The holiday is on the fourth Thursday of the month. Given the way the calendar played out in 202...

Sino-Ag Developments

EconomyLeaders gather this month for the annual Central Economic Work Conference with the view of another sub-par year ahead and the need for bold action to turn the economy around. Recent measures have included lowering the cash reserve requirements at banks so that more money is available for...

FOB Prices and Freight Rates App (Updated 18 December)

Ocean Freight Comments - 13 December 2024By Matt HerringtonDry bulk freight markets are in the middle of the holiday-season slowdown with thin and very quiet trade characterizing what little market activity is present. The peak demand period from the North American grain harvest has now past bu...

Dissecting the Retail Sales Report

Retail sales rose 0.7 percent in November; this was slightly higher than the consensus expectations. There are a few nuances to consider, however. First, the Thanksgiving holiday was late this year. The holiday is on the fourth Thursday of the month. Given the way the calendar played out in 202...

Tear it Up II; Splitting GM Wheat; DOFE

Tear it Up IICanada’s finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned and President-elect Donald Trump is being blamed. That is an over-simplification and she appears to have run away from a fight. But her resignation raises the question of how Canada and Mexico will handle Mr. Trump. Both countr...

Image
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.

Search World Perspectives

Sign In to World Perspectives

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up