Regional Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST COMMENTS: As had been rumored in recent weeks, Iran, Russia and Kazakhstan have now signed an official “memorandum of understanding” for the import of Russian and Kazakh wheat. However, according to the deputy Ag Minister the agreement will be temporary. Iran will also become a member of the Eurasian Economic Union which could greatly benefit Iran’s’ exports with tariff reductions on 503 items. Iran has not been able to reach its target wheat purchase from local farmers and will probably have to import about 3 MMT of wheat. Officials in Iran say farmers are holding wheat stocks and that the government would rather buy locally than import. Stocks in the country are said to...
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.