Policy Updates Argentina’s new government led by Javier Milei has begun and several new measures have been implemented. Despite being unpopular and restrictive, these measures promise to adjust the macroeconomic landscape over the coming months and eventually reduce inflation and free markets. The most significant measures include a strong devaluation of the official currency, which rose from 360 to 800 ARS/USD. This led to a decrease in the gap compared to financial dollars from over 150 percent to 30 percent. Imports will incur an additional 17 percent tax, while exports will have an exchange rate of 860 ARS/USD. There will no longer be government intervention in exports and public spending and subsidies will be reduced significan...
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...
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...
Update for 6 April 2025: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where ob...
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.