Dry bulk freight markets rallied this week buyers extending coverage ahead of China’s Golden Week festival in 1-8 October. The rally came partly from an uptick in cargo demand but mostly from vessel supply disruptions stemming from the U.S. fees against Chinese vessels. This is causing Chinese dry-bulk vessel owners to avoid business to and from U.S. ports and tightening the availability of non-Chinese vessels. There is also an unusually large number of vessels loading from Argentina, which suggests China is avoiding not just U.S. soybeans but other products as well. The dynamics of port fees for Chinese vessels and China’s move to avoid booking U.S. ag products will have significant impacts on shipping rates for U.S. firms.&nbs...
What You Need to Know Today: The surprises from the USDA’s Acreage report were a sharp reduction in winter wheat area from the March Prospective Plantings estimates and a larger-than-expected increase in corn area. The Grain Stocks report offered relatively few surprises, but quarterly d...
On Monday, the Trump Administration suspended the countervailing duties (CVDs) on phosphate fertilizer imports from Morocco via Executive Order. The CVDs were imposed in 2021 by the Biden Administration and were subject to a routine five-year sunset review. According to the Agricultural and Foo...
Key Takeaways: High oleic soybeans produce oil containing 70–80 percent oleic acid, improving stability and eliminating the need for partial hydrogenation, which eliminates trans fats. There are three primary varieties of high oleic soybeans available commercially: Plenish, Vistive Gold,...
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.