Imperfect Petroleum Relationship The assertion has been that petroleum is a finite resource whereas agricultural commodity production can always increase to fill shortfalls. Yet petroleum has also been characterized as a bellwether for agriculture. For example, during the 1997-1998 Asian Financial crisis, petroleum prices fell around 60 percent. Asian markets had been a key area of growth for global agricultural trade and corn prices fell 40 percent while wheat went down 27 percent and soybeans fell 17 percent. However, agriculture has not always mimicked petroleum, at least not fully. Between late 1985 and mid-1986, the value of petroleum had dropped 60 percent. The wheat market fell 19 percent during that timeframe, but corn was o...
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.