For countries that supply renewable agricultural commodities to world buyers, a more perfect world occurs during a year when global demand for a particular one of those is growing while its production in most other competitors declines. In a sense, that is what is happening in the world wheat market of 2018/19. It seems as though Mother Nature targeted production in most major wheat-exporting countries with adverse weather but did so far more leniently by comparison with the U.S. wheat crop. The world set wheat production records in each of the past four years that outstripped demand. After reaching an estimated 658.7 MMT 2012/13, production had climbed more than 100 MMT to 757.9 MMT by 2017/18. However, world wheat use from 2012/13 to 201...
What You Need to Know Today: President Trump suspended the planned attacks on Iran and announced that the pieces for a framework for peace were in place in a weekend social media post. Iran, however, later said no efforts were underway to conduct negotiations with the U.S., though Oman indicat...
Key Takeaways: E15 expansion would support corn and ethanol demand by increasing domestic biofuel consumption and reducing reliance on petroleum-based fuels. Year-round E15 has gained bipartisan momentum, but the policy remains in legislative limbo as lawmakers continue to negotiate provisions...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.