Un-Whole of Government President Trump’s memorandum last week announcing his America First Trade Policy (AFTP) was issued to five federal departments, two of which are only tangentially involved in trade policy. It skipped over the federal department overseeing more than six percent of U.S. international trade and whose constituency is the most stalwart supporter of the President. His AFTP mentions helping farmers and ranchers three separate times but doesn’t once mention his government’s primary overseer of agricultural trade policy. As in his first term, he has elevated the Department of Commerce to a leadership position that ignores the intent of the Trade Act of 1974 in giving USTR primacy. This may or may not be...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.