Trade in ag commodity futures saw two diverging trends to start the week. Weakness quickly developed in grains and oilseeds amid profit taking, weak technicals, and Export Inspections data that were about as exciting as the last half of the Broncos–Patriots game. Conversely, cattle future...
Free Trade Style Brussels realizes the mistake it made when it included agriculture in its free trade negotiations with the Mercosur countries. Proponents bragged that it would remove most tariffs on EU–Latin American food trade and concurrently protect Europe’s geographic indicator...
CORN As of today, 93 percent of the expected area has been planted, representing a year-on-year delay of more than five percentage points. Some late-planted fields may remain unseeded due to a lack of soil moisture. Rainfall remains absent, while persistently high temperatures are increasing cr...
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.