Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Afghanistan’s agriculture will benefit from a $65 million donation by the Asian Development Bank to the United Nations FAO to raise Afghanistan’s local food production, including wheat cultivation, livestock feed production, and veterinary support. The funding should help 150,000 small wheat producers and 100,000 marginal livestock farmers. Pakistan is seeing wheat flour shortages in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and is having to move in wheat for milling from rural areas in Sindh province. 107,000 MT of wheat will be moved in for both February and March. Pakistan farm associations are saying wheat production could drop by 40 percent due to a short...
What You Need to Know Today: Iran says its definition of the Strait of Hormuz is now a “vast operation area” that stretches from Jask to Siri Island. The White House said President Trump did not sign a suspension of the TRQs on beef imports but is “finalizing potential...
If the media headlines and Trump critics are to be believed, President Trump is headed to Beijing this Thursday in a weakened position. China is in control, it has the upper hand, and expectations are very low. These are the same critics that argue against overly simplistic zero-sum analyses in...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.