China Proposing Tariffs on U.S. Beef China’s tariffs for U.S. pork products (see Ag Perspectives, 2 April 2018), which are in addition to existing duties, are probably one of its more strategic retaliatory strikes in the current trade dispute. Domestic hog and pork prices there are down more than one-third so far in 2018. As this situation has escalated, China lobbed a more psychological retaliation by adding beef to a proposed tariff list along with soybeans, the top overall U.S. export to that country. Of course, beef shipments to China are not large; the market was just reopened in June 2017. In addition, the Chinese traceability requirement of U.S. beef is still a practical hurdle. However, according to the U.S. Meat Export Fede...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...