Argentina’s Wheat/Corn Trust The Argentine government is being creative in trying to control inflation rates. They are trying to control local wheat and corn prices by creating a “trust fund” for domestic market consumption. Exporters will have to contribute about $150 million to the fund (though the amount is not confirmed yet) that will be used to subsidize local consumers. What the government doesn’t realize, or won’t acknowledge, is that farmers will ultimately pay for the “trust fund” as exporters will extract their payment from the FAS prices they bid. Farmers are understandably furious with this decision (that has not yet been officially announced) and started meeting this weekend to...
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: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
In agriculture and food processing, we think a lot about infrastructure: transportation and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and delivery. It is a physical system of roads, railroads, and rivers; concrete and steel storage; processing plants, warehouses, and machinery; and, event...