From China’s non-WTO compliance to “gluten free” marketing and excess shuttle-train capacity, a recent wheat conference for North Asian wheat buyers revealed an interesting string of topics. A recent wheat conference for North Asian wheat buyers revealed a great variety of speakers and opinions on a wide assortment of topics. Here are some random thoughts and insights from the conference. Some thoughts have previously been discussed while others are new:• China is not even close to being in compliance with their WTO agreements to restrict wheat and corn domestic subsidies or on tariff rate import quotas. This isn’t a surprise to anyone and many are wondering if they will ever be penalized for violating the rules.• China has harvested t...
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...
What You Need to Know Today: Wholesale inflation was flat in July, with the Producer Price Index (PPI) unchanged versus expectations for a 0.2 percent increase. Core PPI rose 0.2 percent, also below expectations. The softer inflation data has reduced the odds of a September interest rate incre...
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.