Regional Updates MIDDLE EAST/MEDITERRANEAN COMMENTS The Muslim religious holiday of Eid Al Adha is being celebrated across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region this week, and most businesses will be closed as of 20 August 2018 for up to four days. As a result, there will be very little activity in the grain business there this week. Officials in Cairo, Egypt report enough current wheat stocks to cover the country’s needs for four months. Egypt’s National Company for Maize, a maize processing company, is said to be entering the wheat market with the importation of about 380,000 MT in 2018, although reports are not clear as to whether this has been completed or is being planned. Saudi Arabia increased its purchases of R...
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.