Regional Updates MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS Bad weather in Egypt has closed four ports on the Red Sea and two on the Mediterranean. Very strong winds are reportedly causing docking and visibility difficulties due to sand and dust storms. Egypt normally experiences strong khamaseen winds from February to March, but they seem to be a bit early this year. Khamaseen refers to the number 50 in Arabic as the winds are common for about 50 days during Egypt’s spring. Turkey also suffered from bad weather, and the Bosporus Strait was closed over the weekend for safety reasons. This has delayed grain shipments from the Black Sea for a few days. Pakistan’s tender to export 100,000 MT of bagged wheat is said to have attracted at...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.