Corn As WPI readers are well aware, corn prices/basis have risen around the world due to strong demand, most notably Chinese purchases, and tightening supplies. During the past few days, however, world demand has slowed and premiums are reversing their higher trend. For South American origins, premiums seem to have collapsed in the past few days. In Argentina, November/December corn was offered at 175Z a few weeks ago with bids at 165Z. This week offers are at 155Z with no bids in sight. For Brazil, December corn was offered at 200Z and it was hard to imagine a downside, but now offers stand at 185Z versus bids at 165Z. Despite the 20-cent reduction in offer-side premiums, it seems that prices in Argentina did not fall as muc...
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.