World Perspectives

Ag Exports Not the Panacea

According to the FAO agricultural trade index, Africa has experienced the relatively largest jump in the past decade, followed by North and South America. Yet the share of global GDP for both Africa and South America remains low. Despite the boom in agricultural exports where it is now dominating traditional exports out of North America, South American countries have lost ground when it comes to fighting poverty. The share of the population living on $5.50/day has increased in most South American countries, including agricultural powerhouse Brazil. The share of the population at this low threshold unsurprisingly hit 90 percent in Venezuela, but it has also jumped in ag export powerhouse Argentina, rising from 4 percent in 2012 to 36 percent...

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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.

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