Divergence of Markets Food away from home has been outpacing food at home as the cost of human services has written. The categories on the rise include meat, eggs, produce, and alcohol. Food prices are unlikely to descend and even food price discounter Walmart has struggled to restrain what they charge to their budget conscious costumers. Prices that have declined include bananas, salmon, pork chops and sweet potatoes. Nonetheless, one troubling result is that the number of Americans reporting that they lack sufficient food rose 25 percent in 2024. At the same time, more affluent shoppers are increasing their purchases of more expensive organic foods by 13.9 percent CAGR. Through a combination of production hurdles and health concerns...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
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.