On Wednesday night of this week, ethanol mills that were interested in buying surplus sugar under the Feedstock Flexibility Program (FFP) were required to have submitted bids on the sugar offered by various sugar mills through the program. The FFP is intended to avoid sugar loan forfeitures to the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) by requiring the diversion of sugar from food use to ethanol production. The amount that sugar mills could offer in this first invitation was limited to sugar under loan that matures in August. That limits the potential offers and purchases to 118,000 short tons (ST).About 84 percent of that potential amount was actually offered up by sugar mills at a total of 99,375 ST consisting of 69,375 ST of raw cane sugar...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
From WPI Consulting
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.