World Perspectives

Make it Transparent; Planting in 2019; Scale of Safety

Make it Transparent There is no word at this hour as to the outcome of today’s bilateral trade talks between Japan and the U.S. The talks are proceeding according to tradition – negotiations are held in secret until completed in order to avoid special interest group politics from influencing the outcome. The EU-U.S. trade negotiations that are scheduled to get underway on 20 August should proceed in the opposite manner. The two governments already tried the secret approach in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations and failed, in large part due to a lack of trust. That trust must be even less now with Donald Trump’s unique approach to the art of a deal. Given his reputation for low veracity...

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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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