Wheat Argentina Argentina’s farmers are showing a lot of concern about next year’s planting season. Argentina imports more than 60 percent of the fertilizers it uses, which creates a twofold problem. First, prices have risen sharply and second, Argentina’s lack of U.S. dollars will affect their ability to pay for imports and, consequently, secure supplies for farmers. For the time being, Argentina’s wheat export duties will remain unchanged at 12 percent. It is notable, however, that the government can do much more damage to prices and market flows by crimping exports than by increasing withholding taxes. A simple example for this, last week Chicago futures dropped between $12-15/MT (depending on the positio...
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...
In agriculture and food processing, we think a lot about infrastructure: transportation and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and delivery. It is a physical system of roads, railroads, and rivers; concrete and steel storage; processing plants, warehouses, and machinery; and, event...
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.