World Perspectives

BRICS Differ; EU Agriculture Policy Update

BRICS Differ In the adjacent article on BRICS Dominate, it is noted how the five key countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) meeting this week in South Africa stand out in terms of global agriculture. However, they are also different from a policy standpoint. Researchers at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland note some other differences about the BRICS countries:

They make heavier use of subsidies for local business enterprises. Instead of export bans, they tend to use more opaque measures such as licensing restrictions and export taxes and tax-based export incentives.  On average, they use fewer import tariffs, quotas, and licenses.

It is the opaqueness, and autocratic approaches to policy by some major...

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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.

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