Regional Updates MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS Egypt had rejected a cargo of French wheat due to high ergot levels, but the 63,000 MT were found to be within required standards upon retesting. As a result, the wheat will be discharged and released from Safaga port. The FAO reports that Iraq’s 2019 grain crops should be up nearly 67 percent over 2018 with wheat showing the largest increase from 2.2 MMT to 4 MMT. Total grain production of 5.1 MMT will be about 18 percent above the five-year average of 4.3 MMT. However, the low production in 2018 means that grain imports in early 2019 will be 25 percent higher than the five-year average at approximately 5.2 MMT, including 3.7 MMT of wheat and 1.2 MMT of rice. The first 2019 wheat...
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.