USG Blames Ethanol A report by the U.S. government's National Intelligence Council entitled "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds" this week brought media attention to various reasons, but notable for aggies was its forecast for food prices. The intelligence wonks state, "Our modeling suggests that the long-term trend of decreasing world food prices, which has already reversed itself, may have come to an end"; however, they do not think that higher, more volatile prices will mean a shortage of food. Most notable coming from an Administration quite gung ho for ethanol is the report's warning that "[c]ontinued reliance on maize as a biofuel feedstock will also increase the potential for volatility."There is the use of a loaded term where...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Pakistan’s smaller wheat farmers have been holding protests to complain about the lack of a support price for wheat and the potential expansion of GMO crop production. They also want the reinstatement of PASSCO, the governme...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
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.