China's Urbanization Faces Food Challenges Officials from the Leading Group on Rural Work under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China recently commented that the country's consecutive harvests over the past nine years are still insufficient to meet the growing demand for grain. This is the first instance of Chinese government officials showing public concern on the matter.Over the past 20 years, China experienced an ever-accelerating process of urbanization. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China's urban population reached 690 million in 2011, which is up from 170 million in 1978. The percentage of the urban population increased from 17.9 percent in 1978 to 51.3 percent in 2011, while the rural population p...
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.