On Monday, the Trump Administration suspended the countervailing duties (CVDs) on phosphate fertilizer imports from Morocco via Executive Order. The CVDs were imposed in 2021 by the Biden Administration and were subject to a routine five-year sunset review. According to the Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University, these CVDs on phosphate have cost U.S. farmers $6.9 billion for major crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans from 2021 through 2025. Prior to the CVDs, in 2019 and 2020, Morocco supplied 72 percent of phosphate fertilizer imports. Currently, U.S. production of phosphate fertilizer is insufficient to support domestic agricultural food production after accounting for exports. The government is working...
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.