There were plenty of critics of the food system before the pandemic and the disruptions it caused prompted even more over-the-top accusations of total failure. The harshest critics have been those that have long focused on hunger. Never mind that hunger is caused by poverty not the food system, and poverty is the result of power and institutional failures, plus behavioral and structural limitations. The same critics who think it is easy to deliver to the world every single day of the year, 20 trillion calories of safe, healthy, nutritious, and affordable food have themselves long failed at fixing poverty. Just looking at the U.S., the pandemic introduced an initial shock whereby food service sales plummeted by nearly 50 percent while...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.