Concentrated but Explainable In President Biden’s first six months as president he issued an Executive Order calling on federal agencies to investigate economic consolidation that is harming workers and consumers. A new USDA/ERS presentation on Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness looks at three subsectors and while it finds concentration, it does not label it harmful. Researchers looked at the crop seed industry, meatpacking and food retailing. Meatpacking for beef became concentrated back in the 1980’s, hogs took longer and poultry hasn’t changed much. Larger plants achieve economies of scale and there was no change in the farm to wholesale price spread until 2016 forward. Notably, that development...
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...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.