Japan's Soybean Imports Forecast to fall to 43-Year Low Japan's Oil and Fat Importers association on Friday predicted Japan's imports of soybeans this year are likely to decline by 4.6 percent to 2.7 MMT. If imports do fall that low, it would be the lowest level of imports in 43 years. That also would be a 47 percent decline in Japan's imports since it imported almost 5.2 MMT in the 2002/03 marketing year.The sharp decline in Japan's soybean imports is rather shocking considering that Japan was the world's largest single-country importer of soybeans as recently as the 1998/99 marketing year. Since then, China has become by far the largest importer of soybeans while Japan has declined in importance. The decline is primarily a result of a...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.