News Updates MEDITERRANEAN/MIDDLE EAST COMMENTS Wadi Holdings and Medsofts have opened a joint venture Nile River grain port facility in Egypt, which located just south of Alexandria. It is expected to handle 1.2 MMT of grain per year and will have storage capacity of 180,000 MT upon completion. Although similar ventures were considered in the past, the problems with a Nile River port have been the very low draft in the river and lack of transportation facilities from the Mediterranean into Egypt. The new port facility will overcome these issues through the use of 1,000 MT barges that should be able to easily navigate the Nile. While Nile barges have been used for hundreds of years, there have been few, if any, discharge facilitie...
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.