FAO Mediocrity: While the FAO itself makes a few valuable contributions, one of the criteria for becoming its director general is the ability to repeatedly give monotonous and meaningless speeches all over the world. Jacques Diouf flawlessly pulled off this feat for over 18 years and now his successor, Jose Graziano da Silva is quickly proving the ease of the challenge. His references to "rediscovering lost flavors" and praising minor crops can be forgiven since he was speaking to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy. However, he repeated the politically correct, though economically flawed concept that the trend back toward small-scale producers and local marketing of "[u]nder-utilized crops ... can have a positive impact on fo...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Key Takeaways: India is excluding sugarcane juice, sugar syrup, and B-heavy molasses from its 2026/27 fuel ethanol procurement program to protect domestic sugar supplies, potentially shifting additional demand toward corn and rice. India’s corn consumption for ethanol has surged from jus...
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.