World Perspectives

The State and Monopolies

The Biden Administration announced a $1 billion program to incentivize “independent processing capacity” in the meat industry. Noting the irony of U.S. policy concurrently criticizing state-driven enterprise in China, the major meat packers responded with some pointed questions: • How much extra fabrication capacity is needed? • How high should cattle prices be? • How long will “independent” processors be subsidized? • How much will these new government paid packers be required to pay employees? (labor is the biggest challenge confronting the industry) This is not to say that imperfect competition does not exist in agrifood or in any other industry. Researchers in Canada and the U.S. examined...

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Beef packer margins reversed sharply lower last week, swinging back into negative territory after six straight weeks of positive returns. Margins fell $145/head to –$75 as fed cattle prices rebounded $7/cwt (live basis), while the Choice cutout slipped nearly $7/cwt. The rapid compression...

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Bearish Sugar Prices to Continue Despite Production Increases

The U.S. 2025/26 sugar supply is forecast at 14.119 million short tons, raw value (STRV), down 1,800 STRV from November as the decrease in expected imports of refined organic and specialty sugar, which pays the high tier, out of quota duty, more than offsets the increase in beginning stocks and...

livestock

Livestock Industry Margins

Beef packer margins reversed sharply lower last week, swinging back into negative territory after six straight weeks of positive returns. Margins fell $145/head to –$75 as fed cattle prices rebounded $7/cwt (live basis), while the Choice cutout slipped nearly $7/cwt. The rapid compression...

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Bearish Sugar Prices to Continue Despite Production Increases

The U.S. 2025/26 sugar supply is forecast at 14.119 million short tons, raw value (STRV), down 1,800 STRV from November as the decrease in expected imports of refined organic and specialty sugar, which pays the high tier, out of quota duty, more than offsets the increase in beginning stocks and...

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Beans to Storage China is carrying out its annual purge of stored soybeans, selling them at around a half million tons per week over two months at auction. The amount of market discount depends more on quality, which is better than a few years ago when the need for stock rotation was newly appr...

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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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