Macroeconomics Food Prices See Their Smallest Increase n Nine Months The Year of the Rabbit kicked off with a sharp reduction in food inflation, as the average cost was up just 2.6 percent in February from a year ago. The oversupply of live hogs has resulted in a sharp correction to pork prices, which rose last month by just 3.9 percent year-on-year. Similarly, the cost of fresh vegetables climbed by a mere 3.8 percent after an uptick in January of 6.7 percent. The other major categories also seeing a slowing in rising costs include fresh fruit, milk, eggs, and cooking oil, which were up from a year ago by 8.5 percent, 1.5 percent, 7.8 percent, and 6.4 percent, respectively. Along with the costs of food, consumer prices for o...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
WPI recently completed an expansion of our methodology for estimating and forecasting U.S. and global soybean crushing margins. The new approach incorporates the energy market’s expanding influence on the oilseed sector and the structural changes in global biofuel demand. This report is i...
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.