Grains Argentina Ends Currency Controls; Grain Market Adjusts The Argentine government has announced the end of currency controls on the purchase of U.S. dollars at the official exchange rate, along with a unification of the official and financial exchange rates. The move includes the elimination of the "dólar blend" for agricultural exports. Previously, exporters could settle 80 percent of foreign currency at the official rate and 20 percent at the financial rate, boosting their capacity to pay in pesos. Rural leaders described the changes as positive, calling them an important step toward economic normalization, export growth, and increased investment. In practical terms, farmers will now access dollars at the same unified ex...
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.