Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA/AFRICA – MEA REGION Egypt’s Central Bank has increased interest rates by 2 percent to a maximum of 12.25 percent as a measure to control inflation that has been complicated by the Russia/Ukraine “tensions” and related supply chain bottlenecks. Egypt’s GASC has about 300,000 MT of Ukraine wheat orders unshipped due to the Russian port blockade. GASC does not consider this to be a force majeure situation and is looking to its suppliers to fulfill the contracts. A number of the lots of wheat are loaded on vessels that can’t sail from the load port. Egypt is about to receive 61,500 MT of Indian wheat that had started to load prior to the export ban...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. launches naval escort operations in the Strait of Hormuz as Iran attacks UAE oil infrastructure, escalating geopolitical risk and supporting energy and broader commodity markets Biofuel demand entering uncharted territory, with soyoil valuation increasingly di...
The Middle East is said to be undergoing a transformation as economic priorities transcend security concerns. This is evidenced by diversification away from oil and the UAE’s departure from OPEC. Meanwhile, the Palestine issue has been deprioritized, and Iran has emerged as more destabili...
All eyes are shifting to the Senate following the House passage of a farm bill last Thursday. Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Arkansas) is targeting the end of May or early June for a bill markup. According to Boozman, the House “going ahead and passing something was re...
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.