Conceding Market Share American agricultural exporters long ago gave up on hopes of boosting their market share in Europe but now Europe may be conceding other markets to the U.S. Activist groups have eaten the farm lobby in Europe and each day brings new policy prescriptions that seem likely to make the EU’s farm exports less competitive. Now environmentalists want specific and binding emissions targets on agricultural activities. There is a fight over whether European meat and alcoholic beverages should receive any promotional support and foods may have to prove that they are healthy and sustainable to win public backing. It is unclear whether the rest of the world will be willing to pay the inevitably higher price of foods that fi...
Key Takeaways: The CME Group is launching new 90 percent Lean Beef and 50 percent Lean Beef futures and options contracts in July. There are five key factors that must be present in physical markets and futures contract specifications for futures contracts to become successful. The two l...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
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.