News Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST COMMENTS This year's Syrian wheat harvest is reported to be the best in a decade despite the country's current problems. A great deal of Syria's wheat is grown in the Kurdish region, where most of the area has been free from the ravages of the civil war. After recovering from last year's drought, it has produced most of the country's estimated 3.5 MMT of wheat production for the year. Farmers are said to be selling their crop to traders at prices lower than the government offers, because they are being paid at once and there is little risk of the crop being seized by the rebels once it has been sold. The government is slow to pay and farmers must deliver to government warehouses, but traders...
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.