May is World Trade Month and President Biden declared last week World Trade Week. USDA described it as the perfect opportunity to highlight the importance of trade to the farm sector and to the nation. However, most of the private sector free trade wonks spent the time reading former WTO official Ken Rockwell’s blistering 3,000-word expose entitled, What Went Wrong with USTR. The indictment starts with the fact that USTR was born out of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and was charged with expanding the nation’s trade. He then highlights how far the Office has strayed from this agenda under President Biden, and specifically via the dysfunctional leadership of Katherine Tai. It is even suggested that USTR should be dissolve...
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.