Anti-Reform’s Fishy Excuses USTR Robert Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee that the WTO rules are out of date and need reform. This is evidenced by reports that U.S. complaints about the self-designation of developing country status are causing collateral damage to negotiations on fisheries subsidies and e-commerce. First, it should be made clear that fishery subsidies are a greater environmental problem than a trade issue. Most of the large fishing fleets are out of self-designated developing countries, and they are destroying the oceans’ wildlife. Further, reaching an agreement on e-commerce has the larger hurdle of governments wanting to control all data flows and forcing their localization. If WTO members are in...
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.