As the GM food debate in India continues, the supply and demand gap, especially of vegetable oil, is widening, and farmers are losing money due to pest attacks while using more pesticides and herbicides. Possible Sugar Imports Could Alleviate Shortages in a Few States Sugar prices have moved up after the government of India (GOI) increased the duty on raw sugar to 50 percent in July 2017. 0.5 MMT of duty-free sugar imports had previously been allowed, but a shortage has developed in some states since the imposition of the duty, especially in South India (Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) as production there has suffered due to the lack of good rains.Tamil Nadu’s production in sugar year 2016/17 (1 October-30 September) was 1.10 M...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.