World Perspectives

Livestock Roundup: Food Inflation Driven by Proteins

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for December yesterday. For the month, the CPI was up 0.4 percent, while year-over-year it was up 2.9 percent. The core CPI – excluding energy and food – was up 3.2 percent, well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Energy was down 0.5 percent, while food increased 2.5 percent, with food at home (retail) up 1.8 percent and food away from home up 3.6 percent.  For the food at home category, beef was up 4.9 percent on the year, with ground beef up 5.2 percent and beef roasts up 7.1 percent. Retail prices lag behind the wholesale boxed beef cutout, and the cutout was up 8.2 percent in December compared to December 2023, and so far in January the cutout has been...

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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.

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