Anti-Antitrust After two juries failed to reach a verdict and a federal judge questioned further pursuit of the charge of price fixing, the U.S. Department of Justice nonetheless filed a third case against five poultry industry executives only to have a jury definitively acquit the industry leaders. Now food distribution behemoth Sysco (market share 42.69 percent) is claiming that the four largest meat packers colluded to fix beef prices. The Department of Justice has spent the past two years investigating the charge but has not yet issued any official report. Meanwhile, the Farm Action group and the Open Markets Institute issued a report that gave USDA’s efforts at promoting competition within agriculture a letter grade of D+. The p...
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.