Lopsided WTO Proposal A new proposal for WTO disciplines on agriculture subsidies is correct in one respect but lopsided in other ways. The International Institute for Sustainable Development and the International Food Policy Research Institute focus on helping developing countries and so its proposal for disciplining domestic agricultural supports is lopsided in that way. It notes that the U.S. and EU have historically been the largest subsidizers, but it ignores that they are also the most open and largest importers of agricultural products. These rich players use subsidies instead of border measures to support farmers while developing countries can’t afford subsidies and so they use border measures. It is not an either-or scenario...
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.