Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST COMMENTS Wheat buyers in the MENA region will have to get used to higher prices for Russian wheat as farmers are holding back on selling wheat and Russian export prices have moved about 12 percent higher in the past few weeks. Reports in Russia say that farmers have sold about 50 percent of their stocks. Farmers would reportedly rather hold stocks of wheat than corn or sunseed as wheat is easier to store, so they are concentrating on selling those items. However, traders expect Russian wheat exports to pick up in January once the maize/sunseed business slackens. While it is not region specific it is important to note that, according to FAO statistics, 78 percent of all soybeans grown world...
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.