Regional News Last week, a vessel rammed a lock on the Moselle River in Germany, which led Euronext to suspend delivery at French delivery ports on the river for February 2025. The damage was sufficient that initial estimates cited “months” to repair the lock, but more recent news indicates a temporary lock may be opened up much sooner. Russia halted the shipment of two wheat cargoes to Syria over reported payment delays from the new regime. Ukraine offered to supply the grain to Syria instead and it is unknown whether the new Syrian government has accepted the offer.Kazakhstan’s wheat stocks totaled 17.1 MMT as of 1 December 2024, up from 12.3 MMT the prior year and with milling wheat comprising 14.93 MMT of that total. The count...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
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.