Public Health China Lifts Restrictions, COVID Case Counts Soar The fears of the central government about the near-term impact of shifting away from its zero-COVID policy have quickly emerged here in December. Even with last spring’s case count surge, a large portion of China’s population has previously avoided exposure to the disease since the original outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019. In addition, the efficacy of the country’s two domestically produced vaccines seems markedly less compared to the mRMA technologies of Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna, at least for the first two inoculations according to findings published in the Economist magazine and other publications. China’s other major challenge has been the low...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.