Killing the Golden Goose USTR Katherine Tai has been scoring victories against Mexico’s AMLO when it comes to organized labor issues under the USMCA, but it will have a cost. One of the reasons U.S. companies sent their manufacturing to China was lower labor costs. Not only is there now decoupling from China but the Middle Kingdom no longer has low labor costs. Instead, the Economist Intelligence Unit notes that on a labor cost per hour basis, it is Vietnam currently winning the competition for efficient labor, and right behind it is Mexico. Mexican labor has long been part of the key to U.S. agricultural competitiveness. Auto manufacturers have been sending production to Mexico and American unions are pushing collective bargaining i...
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.