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...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Pakistan’s smaller wheat farmers have been holding protests to complain about the lack of a support price for wheat and the potential expansion of GMO crop production. They also want the reinstatement of PASSCO, the governme...
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.