Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA In Bangladesh, the “advanced income tax” on wheat imports has been lifted due to importers declaring much of their wheat as “duty-free” durum wheat. The tax had been 5 percent on ordinary wheat but nothing on durum wheat. The change in the tax is not retroactive so there will be no refunds on taxes paid or due on recent wheat imports. Turkey reports that its main grain producing area – the Konya plain – is suffering greatly from a lack of rainfall. The Konya area produces about 2.5 MMT of grain per year, mainly wheat, and this year rainfall is down by 60 percent since July. With only 10 percent of the area under irrigation, rainfall is neede...
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.