Politics and Trade Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her vice president nominee on the ticket and he reveals the divide on trade for politicians. Representing a Midwest agricultural state, Walz has been a supporter of expanding overseas markets for U.S. farm exports. At the same time, he has expressed skepticism about the traditional free trade agreements that obtained access overseas for American farmers, and he opposed the Obama Administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is unlikely that a Harris-Walz administration would differ very much from Biden-Harris when it comes to trade policy. Ms. Harris may not be as fervent on organized labor as Joe Biden, but she may pla...
There was heavy volume exiting soybeans, which dragged down the broader market today. The lack of a specific Chinese buying commitment for soybeans undermined speculators who had placed bets on state-directed trade. But even the Chinese do not totally ignore market fundamentals. They may still...
On Tuesday, 12 May, WPI reported on an Executive Order being prepared by the Trump Administration to suspend tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on beef from all exporters for 200 days as a means of addressing high beef prices in the United States. After considerable pushback from cattle producer groups,...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscribe online after this date to...
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.