Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA Afghanistan officials say the country may need to import as much as 3 MMT of wheat in 2021/22 due to expected very low rainfall levels. According to some reports the rainfall will be down by 30 percent which could reduce local wheat production by 1.5 MMT to 2.9 MMT. The Sindh Province in Pakistan expects a very good wheat crop this season with the government’s target set at 4 MMT of production – up slightly from last year’s 3.8 MMT. However, there are concerns and complaints in Sindh that the local wheat support price has been set too high (higher than in neighboring provinces) which could easily lead to the interprovincial movement of wheat in search of the...
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.