U.S. officials are headed to Kenya to resume free trade negotiations and while there they ought to talk about the source of Nairobi’s food insecurity this year – its ban on GMO maize. Sub-Saharan corn and wheat production have been generally outpacing the region’s growing population. Over the past dozen years, population growth has averaged 2.45 percent while corn production has grown by an average 3.28 percent and wheat by 3.99 percent. However, the most recent crops have maize production expanding by .82 percent and wheat declining by 2.6 percent. Kenya normally imports corn from Tanzania, which is experiencing a shortfall in production. South Africa has surplus exportable corn, but 80 percent of it is GMO, a tech...
Weather concerns and the impacts of the war in Iran helped push wheat and corn to sharp gains Tuesday, with both markets blowing past key technical resistance levels. The weather is now coupled with geopolitical tensions that look increasingly hard to resolve, which is giving funds the perfect...
Congress is moving forward with its FY 2027 spending bills, while also still working to address FY 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is still in a shutdown. The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee marked up and passed its FY 2027 bill. The House bill prov...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Tunisian researchers have been able to fully sequence the genomes of two local durum wheat types that have been grown in Tunisia for generations. They say that this “could be the key to developing more climate-resistant duru...
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.