In a March WASDE report that made very few substantive changes to the supply/demand balances, it is difficult to find any notable highlights about the current situation. However, the report does remind us of a few shifts that have occurred over time. First, the U.S. continues to hold most of the corn excess stocks in the Americas. Brazil and Argentina held relatively larger shares in 2013/14 and 2015/16, but now hold about 18 percent of the surplus despite increased storage capacity. Meanwhile, the U.S. is holding relatively little of the surplus soybean stocks amongst the three major exporters, which is a return to the norm of just a few years ago. As other analysts have noted, the relatively few surplus soybeans held by the U.S. may forc...
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.