Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Bangladesh is expected to have a record maize crop in 2025 due to increases in planting maize versus wheat or rice. Total maize planting area is up by close to 7 percent which could see the maize crop reach a record of 5.1 MMT – up from 4.8 MMT in 2023/24. Maize production costs are said to be as much as 30 percent lower than for rice. Syria’s agriculture production has fallen from 33 percent of GDP to only 12 percent in 2025 with wheat production expected to be well below recent levels. Winter wheat planting in late 2024 was delayed due to a lack of rainfall and increased conflict levels further reduced planting. Lower than average harvest for wheat is expec...
What You Need to Know Today: CBOT markets pared Monday’s sharp losses as traders booked short profits and adjusted positions ahead of the Grain Stocks report that USDA will release Wednesday afternoon. The 7-day QPF forecast from NOAA now shows heavy rain across the central and western C...
There was encouraging news over the weekend: the White House may reject the misguided idea on Capitol Hill to ban U.S. diesel exports. What WPI has noted previously was perhaps best put by a Department of Energy report of 2022, under the Biden administration: Petroleum liquids markets are globa...
Key Takeaways: Comparative advantage encourages countries to specialize in goods they can produce at a lower opportunity cost and rely on trade for others. Differences in climate, land, infrastructure, and technology help determine where agricultural commodities can be produced most efficientl...
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.