Regional News In its latest crop monitoring bulletin, the EU Commission’s MARS division noted few to no negative impacts on winter crops from the sudden shift to cold temperatures after a wet autumn. Crops were still vulnerable to frost after the warmer-than-normal fall conditions, but the cold snap has reportedly offered little impact. The major impacts, however, were from the wet sowing conditions for much of western Europe, including France, Germany, and the Benelux countries. French officials have noted that their expected soft wheat sowings will fall 10 percent shy of expectations due to the wet conditions. Heading into the new year, temperatures are expected to remain above-average for most of the continent with below-ave...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Iran says its definition of the Strait of Hormuz is now a “vast operation area” that stretches from Jask to Siri Island. The White House said President Trump did not sign a suspension of the TRQs on beef imports but is “finalizing potential...
If the media headlines and Trump critics are to be believed, President Trump is headed to Beijing this Thursday in a weakened position. China is in control, it has the upper hand, and expectations are very low. These are the same critics that argue against overly simplistic zero-sum analyses in...