Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Saudi Arabia’s SAGO purchased 60,000 MT of Ukraine wheat from SALIC (Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company). This is a direct purchase from a Saudi investment company overseas rather than an international tender. Also with Saudi Arabia, the latest USDA-FAS report forecasts that local wheat production in 2020/21 should reach 500,000 MT and wheat imports should drop by about 10 percent to 3.1 MMT. For both barley and corn, Saudi has little or no production. Corn imports are expected to reach 3.7 MMT, close to the five-year average, with barley imports continuing to drop to about 6.2 MMT. Barley consumption has to compete with both local pastures and with comp...
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.