USDA is leading a trade mission to India, noting that it is 1.4 billion people or 18 percent of the global population but accounts for less than one percent of U.S. agricultural exports. Average tariff rates tend to be higher in developing countries and lower in developed countries. But India’s average tariff is among the highest of its peer countries, and 5.5 times that of the U.S. or EU. More problematic is its high bound rates and tendency to frequently change the applied rate as a market management tool. India also has the highest number of nontariff trade barriers of the countries featured below. Trade is very important to Canada and Australia, highly developed economies but with relatively smaller populations. The trade p...
A bipartisan group of 26 lawmakers, led by Representative David Valadao (R-CA), sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and House Agriculture Committee Chair GT Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) requesting that $5 billion of the temporary economic assistance for farmers go toward spec...
Agriculture generates a lot of numbers in addition to crops and livestock. As ag economists, we are continually reviewing crop production, commodity prices, farm incomes, and international trade. You don’t often see much about capital investment in the ag press, however. New mills and gra...
Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, published in 1770, is of a timeless quality. It is a 425-line lament for a disappearing rural world, where prosperous villages give way to larger estates, fewer farmers, and emigration. One passage even follows those leaving for the new colony of Georgia...
The industry has spent two years bracing for GLP-1 medications to hollow out demand, but the data so far tells a more interesting story. Roughly one in eight adults currently uses a GLP-1, and an additional 29 percent of non-users say they would consider it if it became more accessible and cost...
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.