World Perspectives

Pandemic "Food Crisis"

Politico interviewed 11 leaders in U.S. agriculture and determined that based on the pandemic, the food system is not ready for prime time. The thrust of the article is the need to crisis-proof the food system, as if pandemics happen all the time. For example, one observation is the need to stockpile PPE equipment, a conclusion also drawn more than a decade before the pandemic. Looking back to the top news of the 2020 pandemic, it was a shortage of toilet paper due to hording.   There have been absolutely shortages of labor in harvesting and crop processing. Some will not like to solution to that problem – automation. In fact, unemployment increased the need to food, which was met with a very large increase in food assistan...

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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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