World Perspectives

Back to the States to Fill USDA Trade Undersecretary

President Biden has announced his intention to nominate Alexis Taylor as Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs. Taylor has served as the Director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture since late 2016. Previously, she was Deputy Undersecretary for Farm and Foreign Ag Services during the Obama administration; that was prior to the domestic Farm Services Agency (FSA) and Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) being split between two separate undersecretaries per the 2014 farm bill.   Taylor will be the second person to serve in the trade-only role at USDA. The first was Ted McKinney, former Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, and now CEO of the National Association of State Departments of Agric...

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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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