U.S. Soy WASDE Update - January 12

Jim Sutter joined the U.S. Soybean Export Council (USSEC) as Chief Executive Officer in 2010 after over 30 years of industry experience with Cargill, Inc. Since joining USSEC Sutter has led strategy development to ensure that the organization’s key focus is on differentiating and building a preference for U.S. Soy. Key initiatives have included building on the competitive advantage of U.S. Soy’s sustainability, improving the partnership with China in the area of sustainable food security, and demonstration of the intrinsic and extrinsic advantages of U.S. soy to customers around the globe. Jim is also actively working with various industry associations around the world on behalf of U.S. Soy. He grew up on a crop and cattle farm in northeastern Colorado, received a degree in Agricultural Business/Economics from Colorado State University. Jim has worked and lived in numerous global locations and now makes his home in St. Louis, Missouri.

Mac Marshall serves as the Vice President, Market Intelligence for the United Soybean Board (USB). In this capacity, Mac works with USB leadership to evaluate and establish long-term strategic initiatives in support of advancing domestic and international market opportunities for the U.S. soybean industry. He also serves as an industry source of market information and analysis. Prior to joining USB, Mac served as global market analysis and trade lead at Bayer Crop Science, where he worked on international market access issues as part of a global agricultural policy team. Prior to Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto, Mac worked in Monsanto’s global strategy group with a focus on commodity market analysis in support of the company’s long-term strategy setting and understanding of near-term market dynamics. Before joining Monsanto in 2014, Mac served as a staff economist at the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics with a focus on agricultural commodities, in addition to serving as the supervisory economist leading a team of economists covering service industries. He holds a B.A. in economics from Vassar College and an M.A. in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University.

Nagaraj Meda is the Founder, Chairman and Managing Director of TransGraph Consulting. TransGraph Consulting is focused niche player in currencies and commodities and deliverables encompass research, price forecasting, risk management, value chain analysis, risk management software. He is a Post–graduate in economics with specialization in International trade/finance from University of Hyderabad and has additional qualifications in the fields of technical analysis and portfolio management. He also has hands on experience in the commodity futures markets as a portfolio manager in a commodity hedge fund initially and as a consultant presently. Well recognized as an authority in the field of forecasting using technical analysis and has carved a new concept, “Mapping the market thought” to forecast the prices which is a combination of fundamental, technical and statistical analysis. One of the pioneers in implementing risk management process, hedge models in physical commodities trading, sourcing and selling of commodities industries by introducing the concept of Value at Risk (VaR) through proprietary software TransRisk (www.transrisk.net). Worked in developing the hedge models to 60+ corporates spread across FMCG, manufacturing, trading / processing, automobile sectors. Credited for the idea of bringing ‘good things’ of trading into ‘sourcing’ through innovative hedging models that suits manufacturing companies. Presented 100+ papers at various international level conferences related to price forecasting, procurement and risk management.