There is speculation that rice prices will increase due a smaller crop in India, the world’s largest exporter, and the impacts of El Niño. That is not currently reflected in futures prices, which have fallen 18 percent from their high at the beginning of the year. India’s rice stocks have declined 8.5 percent from 2022/23 levels, but the government has increased the minimum purchase price and that will incentivize more production. At the same time, global wheat ending stocks are rising, including a 47 percent increase in India’s wheat carryover. Although rice may carry a preference in Asia, wheat demand has been growing much faster than rice demand. It has nutritional advantages over traditional white rice su...
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.