The biofuels industry gets a lot of attention for influencing vegetable oil prices but growing human consumption has its role as well. The largest importer for vegetable oils as food is India and its population is reaching par with that of China. In addition to population growth, India is the fastest growing large economy in the world. More people with more income means that India will eventually consume food like the Chinese. However, India has nearly five times as many vegetarians as China and so its dietary composition is different. In lieu of meat, India’s consumers will demand more vegetable oil and plant proteins like peas, lentils, and beans. Right now, the Chinese are consuming nearly 50 percent more vegetable oil...
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...
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...
Key Market Insights Macros: Inflation isn’t cooling — it’s moving higher again. March PCE inflation (Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation) rose 0.7 percent month-over-month, pushing the annual rate to 3.5 percent, the h...
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.