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: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.