World Perspectives

More Food, and Fewer Children

Few philanthropists are as focused on hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa than Bill Gates.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on the problem. Activists do not like his promotion of GMO’s as a solution, but they are not as focused as he is on human suffering. This week, Gates noted in the foundation’s annual Goalkeepers’ report that most impacts from climate change are in the food chain, and children are the chief victims.  Progress has been achieved on reducing child hunger in Africa. The problem is that the region’s productivity gains for main staple crops has a CSAGR of 1.95 percent, but the population is expanding at 2.5 percent. Some research shows that foregoing the bearing...

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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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