WTO Chair Fight Selecting new chairs to lead the agriculture and rules negotiating bodies may soon get settled. The rich countries wanted Clare Kelly to lead agriculture. She would be one more New Zealander and Cairns member pushing liberalization in agriculture. However, the compromise candidate is now Alparsian Acarsoy of Turkiye, a country that both physically straddles east and west but is increasingly in global negotiating middle. Choosing a chair to lead rules was controversial because it includes fisheries and developing countries feared an anti-subsidy crusader. The compromise candidate may be Petter Oleberg, of Norway, a country quite familiar with importance of fisheries. Leveraging Trade Benefits First Ethiopia, then Gui...
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
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.