Over the past few weeks, we have come across a number of things related to markets and agriculture that attracted our attention and, we think, deserve some comment. The common thread among them is not so much that they are related, but rather that they are interesting and potentially important. Here are some of them in no particular order. The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation was passed in 2010 as the political response to the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession. Among many other things, it mandated that trade in the unregulated OTC swaps market be forced on regulated derivative exchanges where trading would be transparent, similar to futures trading. Swaps transactions were to be cleared through recognized central...
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.