The conflict in the Middle East continues to dominate developments in energy markets and crude oil or natural gas tanker vessels, but as time passes the conflict’s relatively minor impacts on the dry bulk and container sector are becoming clearer. After a short-lived jump, dry bulk freight rates have pulled back with the conflict (so far) not impacting major routes or vessel availability. Similarly, global container shipping has seen...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Egypt’s annual urban consumer inflation rate is at 14.9 percent for July 2026, up from 14.3 percent in June. Nationwide annual inflation stands at 13.0 percent. Pakistan’s wheat and wheat flour prices continue to move...
Beef packer margins deteriorated sharply to -$167/head last week, down $89 from the prior week as fed cattle prices rebounded while the Choice cutout continued to weaken. The cutout slipped to $363/cwt, while fed cattle prices climbed to $235/cwt, reversing much of the recent improvement in pac...
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.