Regional News Last week, the Balkans and Ukraine saw unseasonably warm weather with moderate rainfall while Russia saw cold weather with light precipitation. The current forecasts call for cooler temperatures in France and Spain, but warmth in the UK and from Poland eastward (with the exception of the Balkans, which turn cool again). Precipitation levels will remain light and below normal for most of the continent. Turkey set duty-free import quotas of 1 MMT of sunflower seeds and 400 KMT of sunseed oil for the period 1 January through 30 April 2025. The import tariffs on these products previously were 12 and 20 percent, respectively. Milling Wheat Wheat markets were highly variable last week with U.S. futures decl...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.