A meeting of U.S. aggies to discuss the renegotiation of NAFTA involved much focus on the net benefits of trade agreements and what is disliked about the current situation, but some key issues remain. Trade Policy Conundrum A meeting of U.S. aggies to discuss the renegotiation of NAFTA involved much focus on the net benefits of trade agreements and what is disliked about the current situation, but some key issues remain.Negotiating Leverage: The biggest overall challenge is obtaining a more level playing field when it comes to trade. Aggies make clear that they absolutely deplore Donald Trump’s threat to quit NAFTA if it is not made more to his liking, equating it to cutting off the nose to spite the face. Yet he makes the threat specific...
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.