Farm Policy Next week is China’s annual ‘Two Sessions’ (the People’s Congress plus a consultative body) where Beijing releases its next Five-Year Plan. It has already released its 15th Five-Year Plan for agriculture. It reflects the nation’s evolution from a developing country desperate for calories to a rich country envisioning smart agriculture and resource-efficient production. This includes integrating technology to overcome resource limits and produce more and higher-quality food along a more sophisticated supply chain. Trump Tariffs The soybean futures market wobbled over doubts about whether the Chinese would buy more U.S. soybeans without the threat of IEEPA tariffs to bind them to current agreements. B...
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.