Many food and ag regulations/policies start off as state and/or local initiatives before spreading elsewhere. Animal welfare began with a referendum on swine production practices in Florida, and nutritional labeling on restaurant menus was a New York City requirement. Labeling of GM ingredients also started locally as did taxes imposed on such ag products and perceived health threats like tobacco and sugar. Sugar-sweetened beverage or soda taxes have been a recent trend with the first local ones mandated in Berkley, California. Last year Philadelphia became the first major city to impose a soda tax, and then Chicago (Cook County) followed suit. Moreover, voters in Boulder, Colorado as well as Albany, Oakland, and San Francisco, California...
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.