News Updates EGYPT COMMENTS A meeting between Egyptian leaders and senior IMF staff is expected to be held this week in Cairo to discuss details of the $4.8 billion loan agreement. The IMF's Middle East and Central Asia director will be the senior IMF official in attendance. The government's cabinet shake-up is not expected to have any effect on the meetings, although the new finance and interior ministers will be involved. Since the change, the foreign-exchange reserves have dropped close to 60 percent and are at a critical level for international trade. The Egyptian pound is at a new low against the dollar, having lost about 10 percent in value in recent months and much of it in the last couple of weeks. Experts believe the pound easily...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.