Yesterday, we took an initial and cursory look at the outcome of the EU’s Strategic Dialogue on farm support. Basically, it says move away from area payments and focus resources on small farmers not large operations. Today, we look at it in more detail, the current spin on its outcome versus an undercurrent of concern, and its potential impact for Europe’s competitors. The preliminary outcome was framed by EU President Ursula von der Leyen (VDL) as a huge accomplishment. Peter Strohschneider, the German chair of the effort praised the unprecedented collaboration of the participants. VDL said “there’s hardly a sector more important to our continent than agriculture…. but we know that our farmers are conf...
The Middle East is said to be undergoing a transformation as economic priorities transcend security concerns. This is evidenced by diversification away from oil and the UAE’s departure from OPEC. Meanwhile, the Palestine issue has been deprioritized, and Iran has emerged as more destabili...
All eyes are shifting to the Senate following the House passage of a farm bill last Thursday. Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Arkansas) is targeting the end of May or early June for a bill markup. According to Boozman, the House “going ahead and passing something was re...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscr...
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.