News Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST COMMENTS Hodeidah, a major port city in Yemen, will undergo an expansion and modernization program that is estimated to cost $700 million. According to reports in the Yemeni press, this port handles 70 percent of the country's imports, but has not seen any major port development in the past 25 years. With Yemen importing almost all of its grain and oilmeal requirements, any improvement in the port will certainly facilitate grain trade to the country.The Iranian government has announced that it will increase its purchase price of wheat from farmers by about 30 percent per MT and will supply 300,000 MT of wheat seed for the next planting season. Iran would very much like to increase the local p...
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.