Last Monday, Gary Blumenthal wrote on the bullish sugar market as global supplies tighten, and demand stays strong. The March Consumer Price Index showed sugar (and substitutes) up 12.7 percent year-over-year. Other sugar containing products, especially when combined with tight supplies of wheat, were up as well. The overall bakery category was up 13.9 percent, cookies were up 16 percent. Those increases compare to overall food inflation of 8.5 percent. The WASDE revised its projection of sugar imports into the U.S. to increase over last month’s forecast. Sugar from FTA countries (CAFTA and the Dominican Republic) – is expected to drop, but world raw sugar imports are up on USTR increasing the raw sugar TRQ allocation. However,...
Key Takeaways: Persistent labor shortages are increasing operational challenges and costs across U.S. agriculture, particularly in labor-intensive sectors such as specialty crops, dairy, and meat processing. Immigrant workers, including H-2A employees, remain essential to the agricultural work...
WPI Grain Prices and Freight Rate App Note: you can also visit the app directly by clicking here. Supplemental Information The section below offers a concise view of the options available in the current version of the WPI FOB Price and Freight Rate app, along with a short “How To”...
What You Need to Know Today: Grain futures fell hard overnight after the USDA’s Crop Conditions report showed better-than-expected ratings for corn and soybeans, despite difficult weather last week. The Conditions report was even more bearish in light of meaningfully beneficial rains acr...
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.