Pakistan is finally joining Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nigeria as a wheat importer. The basis has long existed but has taken time to fully develop. Like the other nations in this cohort, there is a large, growing, and youthful population running headlong into a limited agricultural base. Consumption finally outpaced domestic supply in 2018/19. Pakistan is mostly a desert country with its agriculture and people concentrated in the Indus River plain. It has nearly eight times the irrigated land as neighboring Afghanistan, but it is environmentally fragile. There are floods and earthquakes, plus political and geopolitical instability. Most importantly, there is food insecurity. The government is trying to improve domestic production with bord...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Key Market Insights Macro markets delivered a full whipsaw today. Early in the session, crude oil had rallied back above $100/barrel as traders priced renewed concern over the U.S.-Iran standoff and potential supply risk through the Strait of Hormuz. That strength helped pull grains off their 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.