On 24 July 2018, USDA Secretary Perdue announced a $12 billion trade mitigation package that would be administered in three parts: Food Purchases and Distribution, Ag Trade Promotion (to supplement the Market Access Program), and the Market Facilitation Program (MFP). The latter, which will account for the bulk of the funds, would make direct payments to producers of soybeans, sorghum, corn, wheat, and cotton as well as dairy and hogs. Since the MFP payments were to be based on 2018 actual production, there were questions regarding how they would be reported to the WTO in terms of U.S. compliance with its Amber Box cap of $19 billion. At the time, USDA didn’t anticipate that this relief package would cause the U.S. to exceed that all...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.