At this week’s U.S. Agricultural Export Development Council meeting (USAEDC), speakers touted the record U.S. exports of 2022, which reached a record $212 billion, up by almost 11 percent from 2021 and up by nearly 1/3 since 2018. Note that these figures include forest and seafood products. A closer look, however, reveals that much of the growth was related to price increases. In volume terms, many export categories actually declined. In USDA’s “bulk” category for example, 2022 exports of corn and wheat were down for the year in volume terms and continued to decline for the first 5 months of 2023. Corn exports fell to 7.9 MMT, a decline of 16.3 percent in 2022 and are down by 1/3 YTD in 2023 for the January-Ma...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.