The price of palm oil has been rising since the start of 2021, reaching a local price roughly double the average of the previous dozen years. Production in 2021 was down around 5 percent from the historical average, but the lowest since 2016. Malaysian palm oil exports were down nearly 11 percent from 2020, and off 12 percent from the 10-year average. The sharper drop in exports versus production in part reflects the labor shortage being experienced as a result of the pandemic. However, the real key to the sharply rising price is the concurrently plummeting ending stocks. The palm oil carryover level is down 21 percent from the previous year and at a historical low. The last time stocks it such a low level, it took three years to reb...
What You Need to Know Today: The cattle market rebounded sharply this week, with January feeder cattle futures gaining $16.98/cwt and February live cattle futures advancing $7.60/cwt since last Friday. Tyson Foods' plans to restore a second processing shift at its Amarillo, Texas, facili...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. dollar continued to strengthen Thursday as persistent inflation reinforced expectations for additional Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. Higher Treasury yields have helped support the dollar, potentially reducing the competitiveness of U.S. agricultural...
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.