The demand for vegetable oils in India has increased over the years. Current additional factors affecting the growth in imports are the delay in the soybean harvest and quality issues that could impact the oil supply domestically over the next few months. Food Inflation Rises Again Escalating food prices in India have led to a poll debacle in Delhi. The ruling Congress party lost a major share of a 70-seat state assembly. It was routed by a rookie opposition party that claimed 28 seats, while the Congress party was able to win only 8. One of the major issues was growing inflation accompanied by rising food prices. No party could garner enough votes/seats to avoid a hung assembly, and the government is still to be formed as middle-cla...
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.