MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA/AFRICA – MEA REGION Turkey’s monthly inflation rate increased by 5.03 percent in January while the 12-month inflation rate stood at 42.12 percent. Turkey’s inflation rate dropped significantly from the 75 percent rate in May 2024. Lebanon’s local wheat and barley production are down by as much as 41 percent due to a spring drought in 2024 followed by summer heat waves. Wheat production, according to the FAO, is down from 159,000 to 94,000 MT. Lebanon is expected to import 670,000 MT of wheat in 2025 with total cereals imports reaching 1.2 MMT. Egyptian officials report that they expect Red Sea/Suez Canal traffic to increase in coming weeks as Yemen’s Houthis rebels s...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
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.