Public Health COVID Restrictions Eased in Some Key Cities, Tension Lingers The recent public protests in Shanghai and Beijing marked a level of civil unrest not normally seen in China, since the landmark event of Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is not to say that protests or outrage over government policies do occur, but generally speaking, when there have been public demonstrations, the focus has been on local or provincial level officials. Open chants calling for the leader of China, Xi Jinping, to step down after he was recently appointed to a third term, as has just occurred in Shanghai, reflect just how tired and frustrated the populace has grown with country’s zero-COVID strategy and its effect on the overall economy. As...
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.