Notable WTO Unsurprising at this week’s informal WTO discussions on reform was the continued embrace by developing countries of the tried and failed Marrakesh development agenda. They cling to special and differential protectionism and insist on consensus as the sole way forward, which is to say going nowhere. Richer countries have given up and want to pursue plurilaterals by the willing. DG Okonjo-Iweala notably said that services were the future of trade, while one participant reportedly noted that she is preoccupied with attaching “environment and sustainability to trade issues.” Climate change currently has more momentum as a policy issue than trade and so she is jumping on whatever train is leaving the station. ...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.