Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA The World Bank estimates that MENA region economies have been affected by about $200 billion in costs due to COVID-19. The region’s GDP shrunk by 3.8 percent in 2020. However, things have improved for 2021 with the MENA GDP now expected to increase by 2.8 percent and by 4.2 percent in 2022. Much of the 2021 and 2022 increase is due to the recovery in the economy of Egypt. The World Bank also points out that in 13 of 16 countries covered by the region, the standard of living will be lower in 2021 than before COVID-19. Egypt reports that it has strategic wheat reserves that will cover five months consumption. Pakistan’s Agriculture Committee has set a wheat pr...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.