World Perspectives

Drip, Drip, Drop; Populist Modi

Drip, Drip, Drop USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue told his audience at Michigan State University this week that the Trump administration’s trade policy approach will not sabotage the agriculture sector and that it will not “be a pawn in this issue.” With China’s announcement of 25 percent tariffs on American soybeans and other agricultural products, it is a pawn and it is sabotaging the industry. This fact was acknowledged by his subsequent assurance that the sector would be compensated. Compensation will be a curious construct. The problem in international trade is not just the dumping of steel or the stealing of intellectual property but asymmetry across a wide range of policies. Agriculture gets hurt worse by the Tru...

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Agreement to End Government Shutdown Reached in Senate, Ag Highlights

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livestock

Trump Calls for Meat Packing Anti-Trust Investigation

Late Friday afternoon, President Trump called on the Department of Justice to investigate potential anticompetitive practices in the meatpacking industry. In an announcement on social media, he wrote: I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who...

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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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