Dissecting the Trade War Wrong Goal: During this past weekend’s bilateral negotiations, China offered to buy $70 billion worth of American farm, energy and other products – but only if the U.S. immediately reversed course on imposing tariffs. The Trump administration has declined, seeing the energy purchases as merely redirected trade from other buyers and understanding the near-term limits of farm export supplies. This is precisely why the negotiation should involve the concession of improved trading terms (reduced tariffs and nontariff barriers) and not micro-management of specific transactional outcomes. Wrong Coverage: Journalists like Margaret Brennan now regret the way they covered trade in the 2016 election. She says th...
What You Need to Know Today: USDA reports are delayed until Tuesday due to the federal holiday on Monday. Over the weekend, President Trump announced a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Russia warmly welcomed and confirmed this ceasefire by conducting more strikes against Ukraine. Specific...
On Saturday, 10 October, at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, President Trump said that the U.S. and Mexico would come to terms on a new trade deal, and he said Canada does not need to be part of the deal. Trump called the coming agreement with Mexico “great” but gave no d...
Key Takeaways: The United States has steadily lost global wheat export market share since the 1970s, falling from the world's leading exporter to a projected fifth place in 2026/27. The rapid expansion of Black Sea wheat exports, driven by improved productivity and export infrastructure, has r...
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.