The news headline says that the Filipino government will import 21,060 MT of onions to fill a supply shortfall until the next domestic harvest in February. Consumer prices have quadrupled in the last four months, which has created a political issue. Vegetables as a general category are subject to far less trade than major row crops, but onions surprisingly standout as a product in that category. The Philippines will likely source them from nearby New Zealand, which supplies over half the globally traded onions. Who knew? China at 13.5 percent and Mexico with 12.5 percent dominate the global export market for vegetables as a general category. They are followed by Spain and the Netherlands. The U.S. is the largest importer of vegetables, tak...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.