World Perspectives

WTO Bad/Good/Indifferent; EU Food Fun

WTO Bad/Good/Indifferent Bad: The U.S. Congressional Research Service has concluded that trade war payments and COVID relief payments to farmers have likely exceeded WTO limits on such cash transfers. U.S. officials retort that that they are legal. However, the real problem is that the U.S. has not been notifying Geneva of its cash transfers to farmers for the past couple of years. Since the U.S. has made a big issue about other WTO members failing to meet their notification obligations, this is at least hypocritical. If the payments are legal, why not report them? Good: The U.S. correctly complained in Geneva this week that the WTO has spent money on an effort to track members’ compliance with United Nations’ adopted sustaina...

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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