Another Bailout Package for Sugar Sector The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has approved a third package to bail out the sugar industry. Worth $758 million, it includes a freight subsidy for sugar exports of up to 5 MMT and $1.89/MT on cane crushed in 2018/19. The first package, valued at $1.16 billion, was announced in June 2018 and included loans at a lower rate of interest. The second package provided soft loans for investment in ethanol production facilities, a higher ethanol price for blending and the storage cost for 3 MMT of sugar. 2017/18 has been an unprecedented sugar year (October-September). Due to high production of 32 MMT, stable demand at 25-26 MMT and higher carryover stocks, the sugar industry was unable to...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz and renewed Iranian attacks on vessels and UAE infrastructure are sustaining geopolitical risk across energy and commodity markets Broad profit taking and weaker crude oil triggered a pullback across grains, signaling...
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health held a hearing on legislative proposals concerning food regulation and oversight. The hearing was focused on a wide range of bills, in keeping with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, ranging from anti–plant-based dairy produc...
Decline of China Ag Import Market The media has focused on China’s self-sufficiency effort in agriculture and its implications. In a largely political statement, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Congress that the Trump Administration wants to broaden the agricultural imports...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.