The general election will be held in Argentina next month (27 October) with the two leading candidates for president being the incumbent, Mauricio Macri, and Alberto Fernández. The outcome is viewed as critical for Argentine agriculture since Fernández is allied with former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the Peronists who boosted export taxes during the last time in power. At one-point, agricultural export taxes represented 23 percent of government revenues. By contrast, President Macri eliminated the export tax on wheat, corn and sorghum in 2015, and reduced the tax on soybeans from 35 percent to 30 percent. Agriculture’s contribution to government revenues fell to 7 percent. As a condition for a $...
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.