World Perspectives

Food Dollar Winners and Losers

U.S. President Joe Biden has frequently attacked the companies processing food products, while lamenting the business struggles of farmers. He has told companies to pay labor more, but not to raise prices. The data on the industry’s winners and losers in terms of share of the food dollar retained is collected by USDA’s Economic Research Service. The agency’s latest data is through 2020. Looking at the data in real dollar terms and thus accounting for inflation, the net shift in share of the food dollar over more than a quarter century is revealing. First, it must be recognized that for most of the industry subsectors, labor is the largest beneficiary of food production, processing, and distribution. Over the period analyz...

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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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