Man Behind the Curtain Hypocrisy is a feature and not a bug in politics, but it still deserves no mercy. EU trade minister Maros Sefcovic told Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Li Chenggang that Europe’s trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom is "unsustainable." He urged Li to address it even as Brussels constructs its own new safeguards. The EU has frequently lectured President Trump against using trade deficits in goods to construe “fairness.” In transatlantic relations the EU has called the bilateral trade deficit an incomplete and misleading measure of the overall economic relationship. Now it is China making that same argument to Brussels. The EU will no doubt point to a new report by the Organization for Economic C...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Wheat futures pulled back sharply after Russian President Putin said there was a “chance” for peace and an agreement to end the war in Ukraine. There is plenty of skepticism about the opportunity for peace in Ukraine, but that didn’t stop wheat fr...
President Trump has opened the door to 100,000 MT of beef lean trimmings (limited to HTS codes 0201.30.5091, 0201.30.5097, 0202.30.5091, and 0202.30.5097) from countries listed under the “Other Countries” TRQ effective 1 September. These imports would not be subject to the over-quot...
Key Takeaways: CHS and OCP plan to invest up to $450 million in a Louisiana phosphate fertilizer facility capable of producing more than 1 MMT annually, marking the first new U.S. plant of its kind in more than 40 years. The facility could reduce U.S. dependence on imported finished phosphate...