News Updates EGYPT COMMENTS There was a great deal of discussion this week regarding financing for Egypt, much of it in hopes of supporting the Egyptian pound as it drops lower against the U.S. dollar and the euro. The Islamic Development Bank announced the next tranche of the $388 million group of loan agreements, Qatar announced a $2 billion loan along with $500 million earmarked for currency support, and the European Union announced that it could provide Egypt with 5 billion euros in loans, grants and credit lines. All of this is in addition to the $4.8 billion expected from the IMF once the current negotiations can be finalized. There is still some doubt in world banking circles about Egypt's ability to make the economic changes neede...
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.