Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, west of Karachi, has received its first vessel of wheat and fertilizer that is being transshipped by truck to Afghanistan. Gwadar is a deep draft port that can handle large vessels and offers a shorter route to Afghanistan than Karachi port or Port Qassim. Reports in Pakistan say that wheat imports of about 200,000 MT per month will be needed until April 2021 to insure adequate supply. The country is said to be short of at least 1 MMT of wheat. The argument in Pakistan seems to be whether import will be done by the government or the private sector and if the current import duty on wheat will be lifted temporarily. Some comments are saying that whe...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.