The San Francisco Chronicle makes note that Italy greatly boosted its durum wheat imports from North America following a 10 percent reduction in Europe’s production of this specialty wheat. Canadian sales of durum to Italy tripled to 156,500 MT and sales by the U.S. doubled to 210,000 MT. Durum is harder than common wheat and its extensibility makes it better for pasta and pizza crusts. However, notable is the fact that most of these purchases occurred before the end of September, meaning buyers mostly avoided the subsequent 35 percent rise in the price of North American durum. Canadian grain producers would be more sanguine over the purchases except for the fact that it is likely a one-time anomaly. They point out that Italy’s...
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.