Anti-Antitrust After two juries failed to reach a verdict and a federal judge questioned further pursuit of the charge of price fixing, the U.S. Department of Justice nonetheless filed a third case against five poultry industry executives only to have a jury definitively acquit the industry leaders. Now food distribution behemoth Sysco (market share 42.69 percent) is claiming that the four largest meat packers colluded to fix beef prices. The Department of Justice has spent the past two years investigating the charge but has not yet issued any official report. Meanwhile, the Farm Action group and the Open Markets Institute issued a report that gave USDA’s efforts at promoting competition within agriculture a letter grade of D+. The p...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.