Jones Act on Steroids The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920) requires that shipping between U.S. ports involve U.S.-built, owned, flagged and manned vessels. Cruise ships intentionally make a two hour stop in a foreign port to avoid the law. Half of U.S. overseas food aid must follow the law, meaning less food is shipped due to the higher cost. At present, the U.S. is ranked 19th in the work in shipbuilding, adding less than 10 new vessels per year, versus China at over 1,000. The Trump Administration is considering steep fees on imports brought in by Chinese built vessels, plus other measures to enhance American ship construction and utilization. It will be another ding against U.S. farmers and their export needs. Aller An...
What You Need to Know Today: Corn broke sharply lower after overnight headlines that U.S., Ukrainian, and Russian officials would meet for peace talks on 10 and 11 November. Mexico made its second large purchase of U.S. corn in as many days, bringing total purchases this week to just over 2 MM...
Key Takeaways: The EU's new deforestation regulations, taking effect 30 December 2026, could alter global soymeal trade through stricter traceability requirements and higher compliance costs. Brazil's complex supply chains are likely to complicate compliance with the new regulations, potential...
Beef packer margins improved to $89/head last week, up $53 from the prior week as declining fed cattle prices more than offset weaker beef cutout values. Fed cattle prices fell $3.35/cwt to $224/cwt while the Choice cutout declined $2.49/cwt to $366/cwt, improving packer profits. Despite the re...
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.