Falling Rupee and Higher Input Costs Make Agriculture a Tough Choice Two developments that the government of India (GOI) had not anticipated are higher crude oil prices and the rupee falling against the U.S. dollar. In discussions with the U.S. regarding market access, India moved to impose safeguard and retaliatory duties on U.S. goods, including some intermediate products and non-urea fertilizer components such as phosphoric acid, effective 4 August 2018. While it might be considered patriotic to do so on apples, walnuts and almonds, phosphoric acid forms the base for fertilizers like di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) and muriate of potash (MoP). Phosphoric acid prices in the international market are already up 15-20 percent, and they are like...
USMCA Re-Negotiations At the Iowa Farm Bureau Economic Summit on Friday, former USTR Robert Lighthizer stated that the USMCA renegotiations should focus on the trade deficit with Mexico rather than the trade pact itself. The U.S. deficit with Mexico exceeds $170 billion, including a net deficit...
Corn Harvest delays continue to complicate Argentina's corn market. Persistently high humidity, combined with scattered rainfall across key producing regions, continues to slow harvest progress. In southern Buenos Aires, harvesting remains constrained by poor field access, while across central...
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.