Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Morocco has announced that the suspension of duty on common wheat will be extended beyond 15 June until the end of December 2020. With the local wheat harvest forecast to be much below normal the government wants to ensure that wheat supplies are adequate. Wheat stocks are said to stand at about 4.5 months consumption. Egypt’s Cairo Poultry Co has agreed to the sale of its shares in Egyptian Starch and Glucose to Egypt’s Cairo 3A, an agri-business company. Egyptian starch is a corn processor that supplies corn gluten meal and corn gluten feed, as a processing by-product, to the animal feed industry. With the purchase, Cairo3A is said to be the largest corn processo...
What You Need to Know Today: Agricultural commodities were mostly lower on the day, with red-hot soyoil a notable exception. Export sales were a bit underwhelming, particularly for corn with export sales down 52 percent week-over-week. The weakness in ag markets tracked crude oil weakness wit...
With the war in Iran affecting fuel and fertilizer prices, higher tariffs, weak commodity prices, ag labor constraints, and other factors, farm bankruptcies are now at a 6-year high, a signal of growing stress. During the month of April, 62 Chapter 12 bankruptcies were filed, which is a 1...
Food Inflation The Open Markets Institute, which is notably funded by several “anonymous” donors and liberal foundations, obtained a guest editorial in the New York Times in which they blame agribusiness concentration for higher grocery prices. This is their schtick and it is politi...
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.