Ukraine Firms Denies China Land Purchase Article A news report out of China this week indicated that a Chinese firm, Xinjiang Production and Construction Corporation, had agreed to a joint venture with Ukraine's KSG Agro to buy or lease 3 million hectares on Ukrainian farmland over a 50-year period. The report said the land would be used to produce crops and to raise pigs with the initial amount of land involved to be 100,000 hectares. It was suggested that all of the production from the land would be destined for China.Since that report first appeared, the Ukrainian firm has denied the account and said the amount of land involved in the deal would be far less than had been cited. KSG Agro maintained that it had no authority or plans t...
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.