China has just over 18 percent of the world’s population, but its food imports and consumption share of world food supplies varies greatly. Soybeans are a well-known story. The Middle Kingdom consumes 30 percent of the world’s soybeans and, to its chagrin, it imports 62 percent of the global trade in the oilseed. It is also an outsized consumer of other food products but is not currently as import dependent in them as it is in soybeans. However, food exporters elsewhere in the world might see similar opportunities as soybeans, particularly as Chinese consumers become wealthier. It is a large consumer and importer of cotton but higher value products like meat and seafood might be better targets. Again, this is based on lim...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.