The draft agreement between Washington and Beijing reportedly calls for China to purchase $50 billion worth of agricultural products from the U.S. in 2020. That would be a 291 percent increase from 2019, or a 92 percent increase from the pre-war year of 2017. One would expect China to have added caveats to achieving such a large increase but then U.S. negotiators are unlikely to have allowed a loophole so large that significant purchases can be avoided. Total Chinese agricultural imports grew quickly during 2010 to 2012, increasing by 40 percent in 2010 alone, though from a base that was one-quarter the size of today’s import market. In more recent years, a four percent increase per year has been more reasonable. This means tha...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.