Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Turkish flour miller Ulusoy Un Sanayi has received $25 million in six year debt facility from Hollands FMQ development bank. Ulusoy is one of Turkey’s largest flour millers with its business split 50/50 between local flour business and flour exports. FMQ had previously provided Ulusoy with a $18 million mill construction facility. Pakistan’s wheat flour prices reportedly increased by 10 percent this week which experts say is not justified as wheat prices are steady and supply is adequate in most areas. Press reports blame the increase on the smuggling of wheat and flour out of Pakistan. However, millers say that high prices are due to them having to buy expensive i...
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.
Energy: Risk Over Rules Fighting between the United States and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz escalated overnight. Tehran accused U.S. forces of striking a residential area after U.S. Central Command said its second round of attacks in three days targeted Iranian radar systems and mi...
Key Takeaways: Ghana’s new law classifies all cocoa plantations as “protected farms,” which carries significant implications for farmers. Chief among these implications is the inability to switch area under cocoa to other crops, even when economic or biological conditio...
Key Takeaways: Paraguay typically ranks among the world’s largest soybean exporters, with roughly two-thirds of its production destined for export markets, although most shipments remain within South America. As a landlocked country, Paraguay relies heavily on the Paraguay-Paraná...