The modern U.S.-China trade relationship has always been strained. President George W. Bush addressed this challenge by bringing China into the WTO to force its compliance with global trading rules. However, that didn’t work. While two-way trade did grow significantly, so did China’s manipulation and disregard of WTO rules it didn’t like (including coercion on tech) along with the imposition of ad hoc non-tariff barriers on U.S. ag commodities. Over the decades, the latter have included beef, chicken, pork, corn, wheat, ethanol, and DDGS. Following that effort, President Obama focused on diplomacy and engagement, such as a bilateral investment treaty and the U.S.-China Economic and Strategic Dialogue. He also used i...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran resumed missile strikes after a brief pause in fighting, raising concerns that the five-month conflict could expand across the Middle East. Jordan intercepted Iranian missiles, Kuwait reported a fatal strike, and drone attacks damaged two natural...
The Senate Agriculture Committee will take up the farm bill next week, and a number of amendments targeting the meat industry are expected to be offered. Two of the most potentially damaging are the Schumer amendment, based on his bill, the Family Grocery and Farmer Relief Act, and mandatory co...
Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, published in 1770, is of a timeless quality. It is a 425-line lament for a disappearing rural world, where prosperous villages give way to larger estates, fewer farmers, and emigration. One passage even follows those leaving for the new colony of Georgia...
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.