The FAS attache in Canberra expects Australia’s wheat production to fall by 25 percent in 2023/24. This follows three years of record sized crops. Lower prices and drier conditions are the cause. Of the six major wheat exporters, Australia has the highest variation in its production and exports. This is thought to be caused in part by susceptibility to El Niño weather events. The outsized rains of higher world prices of the past couple of years encouraged Australian farmers to plant almost a third more area to wheat in 2022/23 than they did in 2019/20. This year, Russia supplied nearly 27 percent of the wheat traded by the world’s top exporters. However, a caution to importers is that Russia has the second highest volati...
Key Market Insights Macros: Inflation isn’t cooling — it’s moving higher again. March PCE inflation (Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation) rose 0.7 percent month-over-month, pushing the annual rate to 3.5 percent, the h...
What Matters Today... Fed holds rates steady as inflation uncertainty tied to the Iran conflict pressures equities and supports broader commodity risk premia Biofuel demand accelerating globally, with U.S. imports of used cooking oil and strong soyoil demand reinforcing upside across the soy c...
From WPI Consulting
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.