World Perspectives

Dissecting Japan and Europe; Subsidizing Competitors; Lowly in Rome

Eastern European members complaining that food companies sell inferior products in their part of the EU should be informed by the American experience. Dissecting Japan MIT professor and Japan specialist Richard Samuels argues that the island nation was forced by globalization to evolve from a 1980s strategy of autonomy, consortia (collusion) and (government) nurturance to the present day better, faster, cheaper. However, this cannot be said of its food sector. As noted in the WTO’s latest trade policy review, Japan’s agriculture has “relatively high levels of protection and support.” The U.S. noted numerous market access barriers and imports controlled by state trading enterprises (simultaneous buy and sell).The Abe government has initiat...

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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.

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