WTO at the Firefight WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is headed to Washington ahead of the planned MC-12 meeting but she will not like what she finds there. Recognizing that Geneva is a policy dead-end, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called for a new trade architecture, one that involves a coalition of the “countries we know we can count on.” Sounding like a kinder and gentler Donald Trump, Yellen wants plurilateral trade agreements that “work better for American workers.” Her speech won praise from Washington’s more protectionist think tanks and labor unions. However, the more notable highlight is the deepening rift between Beijing and Washington. While Yellen specifically called out countr...
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.