Regional Updates MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS The latest USDA-FAS report on Turkish grains indicates that better rainfall through February 2019 versus the two previous years should result in higher crop yields, although winter crops may not be up overall due to the smaller planted area in late 2018. For wheat, 2018/19 production is expected to total 19.MMT with wheat imports at 5.5 MMT and wheat/flour exports at 6.5 MMT, and all are expected to remain at the same levels in 2019/20. Meanwhile, barley production is projected to reach 7 MMT in 2018/19 and then increase to 8 MMT in 2019/20 (Turkey does not import or export barley.) Looking at corn, the forecast has production at 5.7 MMT and imports at 2.2 MMT in 2018/19 with a drop to 5...
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.